


The cold side of Ragnarok

by orphan_account



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Autistic Lalli, Awkward young men falling in love, Dreamscapes and havens, Family Problems, Gen, Kitty is not what she seems, Mostly canon Complaint, Norwegian and Finnish pantheons, Past non-sexual child abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-18
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-08-31 17:12:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8586883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: "Something is different about him.""I'm pretty sure you're just saying that because you're in love, Lalli-cat.""This has nothing to do with whether or not that's true. Something is seriously wrong with Emil." Lalli's right, of course, but the nature of exactly what is 'wrong' with Emil proves a lot more complicated than initial estimates. No one could have guessed he might be a lost king, for example, tasked with leading Asgard's army of einhejar to rescue Asgard on top of that. This will be an interesting Ragnarok.





	1. Stirrings

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on that one prompt ages back where Lalli found Emil in a barrow full of weapons and went "What" and the other two that ensued from it, though it doesn't necessarily follow the same canon. The necessary context is that Lalli found Emil asleep and decked out in royal garb, like a mage in their haven, but he was in what looked like a medieval prepper's basement, went "What" and left and has been bothered by this experience ever since.
> 
> Cue frustratingly vague prologue!

Even shed of his armour and the majority of the well-wrought silver that mark him out as a person in a position of authority, the king in the water is still quite obviously a king. The air of nobility hangs about him. In the way he holds himself, tall and straight-backed, his shoulders perfectly squared. The look on his face is definitely that of a person who is haunted by a great burden of responsibility. To whom is not clear. Only that the king has many depending upon him to make the right decision and he is not at all confident that the choice he has made will help them.

His cloak, shoes and sword lie on the grassy bank. Later they will be restored to him, the sword laid in his hands at the ready for however long it may be that he is to sleep.  
Anywhere from days to months to centuries. The king has never learned optimism and in his future lives will continue this unfortunate trend- he suspects the lattermost of the options is by far the most likely. A sleep of centuries, and after all that, he suspects he will wake only to a dead world. 

And he voices this to the woman in front of him “I have a feeling I’ll sleep for a thousand years and never stir once. When I wake up, our world will be dead to us in ways we never could have imagined.”

The woman is enormously tall. Where the river is at the king’s waist, it only brushes her calves. In one hand her skirts are bunched up and out of the way of the water. The dress is already somewhat spoilt from soot, blood and corpse-smoke, but she is fearful of tattering it further. She knows the dress will have to serve as her only armour for some time.

“I doubt anyone has ever told you you’re very dramatic,” she scratches the side of a recently broken nose and winces in pain “So I will. Sleep with these words in your ears, young king- you’re very dramatic. Try to relax a little bit while you sleep the dead-man’s sleep.”

He is in no mood for jibes and taunts, gentle though they may be “How long will I sleep?”

“You guessed a thousand years.”

“Was I right?”

She shrugs her massive shoulders, causing a sheaf of golden, ash-smudged hair to tumble past her neck “How should I know? I can only guess. The way the fight is going…” her eyes grow dark, her face, troubled and distant “I’ve already spent more time on small-talk than we have to put you to sleep. Give me your hands.”

He offers her his hands. They remind him of curled leaves in a child’s palms when she takes his hands in hers, closing her cold fingers around his.  
“The others are going to die, you know.” she says rather suddenly.

The king tries not to tremble “I know.”

“Speak and think of them as the dead from now on, or you’ll break your own heart.”

“And I’m the dramatic one?”

“Yes, you are. I don’t know what I expected from a boy-king.”

The king wants to point out that his age puts him well into the realm of manhood in most cultures, but thinks it unwise to contradict a testy goddess in the middle of a spell.

The sleep steals into him. A cold fog rising from his feet to his crown, totally separate from the icy numbness that bit into his bones from the freezing water.  
He hears her, distantly “These waters are the melt from Tuonela. A tributary of the waters which eventually feed into Mimir. If this doesn’t put you down for as long as you need to be down, then you just weren’t meant to sleep.”

When he speaks, it is a conscious, concentrated effort to move his tongue “And I’ll know when I’m supposed to wake up, won’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Because of the hannunvaakuna.”

“That and we can safely assume the situation will desperate enough that you’ll be slapped awake.” Looking up at her is like squinting through clouds to look at a weak sun “And on the off chance that you do wake up before the bearer of that charm comes along, stay in your barrow, and for the love of Asgard, the halls of Ukko, don’t leave alone. I’m not trying to scare you when I say you will die. I mean it. You will die. You’re going to be without magic. Your enemies will fall upon you so fast-”

“Alright.”

He can no longer stand on his own, and has only just become aware that his blood is glowing under the goddess’s touch. As his own legs ready to give out underneath him, the goddess removes a hand and places it in the small of his back to brace him. 

“Look at me.” she orders.

With a supreme effort, he fixes his eyes on her. One last look at her- a battle-torn goddess, possibly beautiful, but mostly savage. Cloaked in blood and ash, a snarl upon her lips in her last-ditch effort to rescue the kingdom. His kingdom. Her domain. 

“Do not dream.”

The last vestige of consciousness leaves the king. Before he can swoon into the water, the goddess gathers him in her arms.  
Her face softens in a way that is almost loving “You better pull through for us. So many of us are already dying that I wonder if I should just put you under the water. Let the Swan have you. She’ll have us all if the sickness has its way. Remember, boy-king, that it’s your solemn duty to ensure that it doesn’t.”

She pauses.

“In retrospect I should have said those things while you were still on this plane of consciousness.”

The goddess drops her dress. Gauzy fabric trails in the water like a great tail and bleeds a film of oily blood. She cannot leave him with such a petty regret in his ear.  
“One day, we will all be well again. Make us so.”

And she steps from the river, leaving no trace that they were ever there except for a smear of black and a putrid shine on the surface of the water.

 

(Y 71)

What is left of the woman screams when the scalpel touches her belly. She cannot feel any pain, but knows there should be excruciating pain and despairs for the lack of it. The doctor bent over her does his best to hold his hand steady. Still, his hands shake and the incision becomes jagged. He feels the scalpel slice too deeply and jar against something solid. It hardly matters- as long as he does not hit the child.

From the corner of the bedroom, a man watches. His hand is over his mouth to muffle a sensation climbing in his throat. Whether it is a scream or vomit, he does not know. He wants to shout to the doctor to be careful, that the meat under the scalpel is yet his wife who is obviously in agony, going by the noises she makes. But he dares not open his mouth.  
Instead he stares at his wife’s pallid face. Her blonde hair is stringy with sweat and drags over her face like seaweed on a submerged stone. Only her mouth is visible; a screaming red maw with flecks of blood on the lips and missing teeth. What is visible of her skin has turned the colour of the slush that gathers in the gutter the first day after a snowstorm, when the salt has hit the roads and the snow has been hacked away with shovels. The bones of her neck are like sticks, her pulse, a frantic bird against her skin, beating its wings against her in the hopes of freedom.

It is only when he hears a wet slap that he can bear to look away; the doctor reaches into a red mouth in her belly and starts scooping out the insides, bare-handed. No use in worrying about hygiene. All present in the room are immune, save for the woman, and anything that can be done to speed the process should be done. Her husband is fascinated and horrified in equal measures as the doctor pulls out a pallid pink rope, mottled with veins. What seems like metres of this rope is fed into a bucket on the floor.  
Next comes a sack-shaped organ that is placed in the bucket with more care- the bladder. A second rope comes out, and then the doctor reaches in with a scalpel clenched between his gore-sleeved hands and brings out a swollen, glistening thing and rests it on top of the woman’s body.

At the sight of her own uterus, the woman lets out a fresh scream. The doctor carves into it quickly. There is blood. A fluid not unlike egg yolk. A sizeable splash, then a little clenched fist spills from the cut. 

Sighing with relief, the doctor widens the cut until he has halved the organ and hoists an infant out of the mess. The child is well-formed and of average size. Through the slime of the womb, the doctor can see a fuzz of hair that seems to be the same shade of blonde as the mother’s. For a long moment, all is still but for the woman’s soft, mechanical sobbing.  
The child opens his mouth and begins to wail. Uncertainly, at first. It is a gurgling cry that becomes a steady one that becomes a loud and irritable cry that makes the doctor forget himself and laugh aloud.

“You have a healthy boy, Mr Västerström.” he announces, reaching for the scalpel once more to cut the umbilical cord.

At last, the woman on the bed sags back and is silent.

 

(Y 72) 

By the time Sigrun passes her twelfth summer, she has already killed two trolls. Most children of her age in Dalsnes have yet to see a troll at a close enough range to kill it, or be killed, if their guardians are doing their job.  
Sigrun’s were doing their job when they allowed her within striking distance of a troll. Each of them are high-up in the Norwegian military and consider it important to give their child some exposure to the monsters she will one day fight professionally. Not the kind of exposure they had, of course; a childhood of crouching and hiding in terrified silence while trolls ransacked refugee camps and tore their families and friends apart like paper. Just enough so that she doesn’t turn out soft and pampered.

Sigrun is about to kill her third troll. She is neither excited nor frightened by the prospect. She regards it as another child might regard a trip to the dentist; a grim necessity.  
Her parents told her she would face this challenge alone, but she knows they are lurking somewhere nearby. Neither of them can whisper very softly. Every now and then, when the wind blows in the right direction, fragments of their hushed conversation is washes over her head. They seem to be worried that she will seek a bigger challenge than what they are willing to present her with. Something that she is not yet prepared for- something that will strike into her a fear she is not yet aware that she is capable of feeling.

Sigrun is not afraid. She is not afraid to be perched upon the low stone altar where they make the sacrifices on the solstices. She is not afraid to sit upon the deep, dark stains where blood has been spilt and over which more blood will be spilt. She is not afraid of the smell of it, though she knows it is this smell which will ultimately bring the trolls within arm’s reach.  
Trolls frighten her, of course. That’s just common sense. When she lies in bed at night, visions of trolls plaster themselves to the insides of her eyelids, and the smell of trolls fills her nose, chasing her into her dreams. In her dreams she can do nothing to defend herself but awake in the morning, and pretend she did not cry when she goes down to breakfast.

But here? Out here, in the wilds, on a low stone throne furnished with old blood, Sigrun is powerful. Sigrun is what the trolls should fear. Here, she is the closest to what the gods intended her to be.

Ahead of her, the trees shiver. Her parents’ voices fall silent. Sigrun stands and draws her knife.

When the troll looms out of the foliage, Sigrun greets it impatiently “I was waiting for you.”

 

(Y 85)

“I’m not going.”

Onni’s announcement is met with silence. Her eyes angry and surprised, Tuuri puts down her fork and crosses her arms. What little appetite Lalli had a moment ago disappears as he recognises her expression and wishes he could slink away. 

“Why not?” asks Tuuri, her voice low and measured “It’s a good job. The money’s good.”

Onni matches her glare with an imperious stare of his own “We don’t need the money. We’re eating, we’re clothed, we’re fine.”

Tuuri shakes her head “Yeah, I know we’re fine for money, but what about next year? What if the market for grumpy-ass mages dries up? It’s always good to have savings.”

“We have savings,” rumbles Onni, chasing a fragment of salad around his plate with a fork “We’re fine for money.”

“Just talk about the real problem,” mumbles Lalli. He hates confrontation. The less time he has to spend stuck here while Onni and Tuuri argue over his head, the better.

They both look at him; Tuuri, slightly annoyed that he isn’t taking her side, and Onni, surprised that Lalli spoke at all.

“Alright,” says Tuuri tartly “I will. Onni, stop being such a fucking coward about leaving Keuruu.”

The effect of her words is the same as if she hit Onni in the face with a plank of wood. Lalli sinks a little into his seat. Onni’s face starts to redden from the base of his neck. If Tuuri realises she has said too much too quickly, she gives no outward sign of it. On the contrary: she seems quite pleased with herself for saying it, as if it were something that hung over their heads all day.

When Onni does find his voice again, he sounds as if there are a pair of hands about his throat “You can call me whatever you want. You can say what you need to make yourself feel better about the situation, but you are not leaving Keuruu.”

Tuuri’s face starts to turn red too. From her ears and downwards. Lalli watches the angry flush’s progress with a mild interest “This isn’t about me, this is about you-”

Onni’s face is a violent red, a vein in his temple standing out. “No, Tuuri, it is most certainly about you because you think if I leave that gives you permission to prance out after me at a whim! That is not how this works!” 

Tuuri is red down to her chin now “It’s not about me!”

“Yes it is! You haven’t given a second’s thought about how I might feel about going all the damn way to Kajaani since you heard about the offer, have you? It’s just been about how fast you can get me out of the house so you can do whatever you want, and then when I come back-”

“I can take care of Lalli!” she protests “I’m old enough and mature enough.”

Onni slams a fist on the table. The cutlery jumps “Gods blast it, Tuuri! You’re still talking about yourself! We’re talking about the family! I can’t just leave you two, and definitely not for a weeks-long job I don’t need to do! I’m not going to walk out on the family!”

“Leaving Keuruu isn’t walking out on the family, you fucking idiot! It’s living a fucking life! It’s being more than a mouse cowering in the walls for the rest of your life- you may be happy to do that for yourself, but you’re not gonna bury me in here with you.”

The two of them stop as a bedroom door is sucked shut by a draft, startled by the noise, and only then does either of them notice that Lalli has slipped away.

 

 

(Y 86)

A full two days after the trolls broke through the barriers and re-took Kastrup, Mikkel finally gets the chance to sit down. The potent cocktail of adrenalin and anger that kept him lucid and working is about to wear off completely, and he knows that he had better be near a cot or a bed when that happens. Fainting in any random place runs the risk of him being mistaken for a corpse.  
Mikkel got through the battle without any serious injuries. He has seen Michael twice since coming off the battle-field, and the second time his brother was awake and doing his best to smile. He’ll be up and around by tomorrow, probably.

With this thought offering a minimal comfort, Mikkel strips off a pair of blood-filthy gloves and tosses them into a barrel over-flowing with medical waste. He shrugs off his medic’s coat and tosses it over a crate of dented, snapped or otherwise damaged blades. He walks past the rows of tents and ignores the cries of pain as best he can. Nothing he can do at the moment. He’d probably kill someone if he tried to treat them, while his vision swims and his hands shake like this. 

“Mikkel.” says a voice at his elbow, and then Siv Västerström has a tight grip on his arm and is steering him into the alley between two tents. He fails to see the need for the secrecy. Who could possibly hear them over the dying and wounded? Who would want to eavesdrop on them anyway?

But he allows himself to be lead away. Siv is his superior no matter the situation. When she is satisfied that they are hidden, Siv turns to him “Have you slept yet?”

“No.”

“You should. We’re leaving tomorrow.”

Mikkel rubs his temples “What for? The clean-up here isn’t close to finished.”

“The Shadow Council wants us back to report.”

“Well, we didn’t find anything but bones. What do they expect from us? It will be the same story we told them over the radio.”

Siv shrugs, her eyes sunken and tired “I suppose they want the bones. There are no viable tissue samples for study. Whatever killed them sucked the marrow out.”

“So, what? We have to go all the way back to Mora to inform Shadow Council that the creatures are cannibals?”

“Don’t snap at me, Mikkel. It’s not my call.”

His arms drop to his sides “I can’t leave my brother.”

“So don’t. Bring him along.”

“To the Shadow Council? Really? You think bringing Michael along will improve their mood?”

She narrows her eyes “He and Maja can stay in my house while we finish business, then you can all go on to Bornholm. You’ve earned a rest. I doubt the Shadow Council will object.”

“Maja is dead.”

That stops her for a moment. Siv drops her hands into her face and mutters “I’m so sorry.”

“I am too.”

“I didn’t think this would go so wrong,” this is more to herself than to him “It was just a recon. We were just supposed to use the distraction to capture a specimen and go- a day long job at most, then the army could push on…”

She trails off. Nothing she has to say can make this better. Nothing she has to say will make Mikkel any less tired and sore and defeated.  
He turns his back on her and departs without a word.


	2. Waking nightmares- or rather, nightmares awoken

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the luonto and fylgja get names and Emil is apparently now a competent soldier.
> 
> Though this will become a little clearer later on, the time has skipped ahead so that it's now about a year and a half since the first mission. Where's Mikkel, you ask? We'll see him next chapter, along with Tuuri and Kitty. Also this chapter ate at my will to think so I can't promise all of this makes sense.

(Y 92. The outskirts of Dalsnes, near the trick-cliff) 

Emil has no idea what’s chasing him, but goddamn if it isn’t angry. 

It’s enormous, a thick-set beast of about two stories with no features to distinguish it as any kind of particular animal, except for a cluster of arms hanging from what appears to be its belly. Thundering through the forest behind him on legs as thick as telephone poles, its progress marked by the crunch of trees splintering beneath its incredible girth. He has a lead of about 200 metres and would already be dead if it weren’t for the density of the forest, and the steepness of the terrain.  
Every other minute Emil finds himself having to leap off the top of a shelf of rock, land in a tree and scramble down the trunk and hit the ground at his top running speed. It is just a simple truth that he would have been dead half an hour ago without Sigrun’s help.

Not that Sigrun is with him. He has no doubt that she be screaming encouragement if the circumstances permitted it- probably carrying him over her shoulder, in fact. In the same way that a child internalises the voice of their parents when they received a scolding for ill behaviour, Emil has internalised Sigrun. Everything from her favourite jibes to the particular, shrill edge her voice takes on when she especially passionate. Her voice comes from a place deep inside him, pouring profanities in his ear. Did he think this was good enough? Did he think being afraid was going to get him anywhere but dead? Do you know what happens to people who die by being squished by trolls? It’s an honourable death, no doubt, but the folks who got gored or jumped in front of bullets will point and laugh and laugh and LAUGH for the rest of eternity! Do you want that? No, I didn’t think so, so get your blond butt in gear.  
She has no idea where he is at the moment. They were separated when Emil had to turn his back on the battle and run, leading a troll away from the main fight. An unholy mess like this he knew would crush their already under-prepared outfit. Self-sacrifice is stupid, he thinks, and necessary.

 

Emil doesn’t think he has ever run faster in his life. That’s really saying something, considering the amount of time he has had to spend fleeing and chasing all manner of trolls since he arrived in Dalsnes. The year before was a much quieter one in terms of troll-hunting. A rough summer (for the rest of Dalsnes- compared to what Emil dealt with in the winter of his twentieth birthday, Emil kind of wanted to laugh at what Dalsnes called a hunting season), followed by a tame autumn, followed by a winter so still that soldiers began to turn boulders in search of trolls’ nests out of sheer boredom.  
And then something happened in this last week. A sudden onslaught of trolls. While normal trolls are known to wander a tad aimlessly in their quest for life to eat, these trolls seemed to move with a purpose. Emil hasn’t seen trolls swarm so determinedly since the encounter with that murder-ghost-horse that almost ate his brains. They are headed for Dalsnes. There seems to be no stopping them, in fattened numbers, with swollen members like the mountain of rot pounding after Emil. At least Emil knows he can stop this one.

 

At last he breaks through the line of trees. Here, a bare out-cropping of rock that gives way into a steep cliff. The drop is dizzying and most likely fatal. Emil turns his back on the woods and breathes deeply. His chest is on fire. His hands shake. There is a dangerous tingling sensation in his nethers that warns him he might lose bladder control from a combination of panic and exertion if he is not careful. He has arrived on the edge of a significantly larger cliff than the previous ones. Really, this is an exposed slice of the mountainside, sheer and plummeting into a long drop that will most certainly kill him. Emil glances over his shoulder. The treetops shiver, spraying birds. A few of them topple to the side. The grey-brown hide of his pursuer emerges through the screen of spring-foliage and bursts onto the ledge.  
Emil almost steps backwards over the cliff. The shock is a physical, pushing force that hits him in the stomach and makes his guts churn. Up to this point he thought he had seen the worst kind of trolls the Silent World has to offer- things trapped in hospitals with nothing to do but expand and putrefy. This thing has shown him the light. He still has much to see and be horrified by.

His hand flutters to his collar, where his pendant hangs. In the next instant the troll has lunged for him. Emil pivots on his heel and slips over the side of the cliff. The troll plunges after him and falls and falls and falls and falls and strikes the ground with an enormous wet splat.

Even from about 340 metres above the site of impact, Emil has to dodge a squirt of sludgy blood that strikes the cliff-face less than a metre from his head. Fortunately, his free hand is clamped over his mouth, so the only bad taste comes from his stomach attempting to crawl up his throat. The other hand is snarled in a rope as thick as Reynir’s braid. This rope serves as his only protection from a fall to his death. Or perhaps not his death, as he would be landing in the massive explosion of squishy corpse that cakes the cliff-face and ground beneath him, but that would be so gross in itself that Emil would never feel clean in his own skin again.

“Holy Hel.” he breathes through his fingers.

Emil only takes a moment to admire his work (and to confirm that he has retained bladder control), then sets about climbing the rope back to the top of the cliff. It’s set into the cliff by a series of pegs and covers about 10 metres from the edge of the cliff and downwards. After that length, the person is probably falling too fast to save themselves without also wrenching their arms out of their sockets, which would cause them to fall again anyway.  
The manoeuvre Emil has just pulled off is technically illegal because of the enormous Cleansing task it creates wherever the troll is dropped. Also because there is a fatality rate of 85% and the Norwegian military got annoyed with the amount of closed-casket funerals going on. In the old days, anyone who intended to use the trick had to practice and succeed at least twenty times, and were watched by a mage who could use the local winds to rescue them from their many falls.

Emil has only seen this cliff and the rope once before today. He tries not to think about that. Reaching the top of the cliff, Emil rolls over the ledge onto solid ground again and lifts his trembling hands to inspect the damage. As he expected, his palms are scraped raw. The fingernail was torn from his left hand and there’s a gushing cut on his right thumb that makes it impossible to use his hand without a twinge of pain. Both knees of his trousers are torn open and, for a horrifying instant, he thinks he can see a chip of bone through the exposed tissue. This proves to be a pebble embedded in his skin.  
He lets out a shuddering hiss of pain and drags himself to his feet. A grim curiosity compels him to glance over the edge for a better view of the destruction. Putrid flesh slathered over an area of at least a thirty metres, like the ragged hide of a badly skinned animal. The iron smell of old blood rises in a sickening wave and glistens on the flesh and leaves of every single piece of foliage in the area.

Sigrun is going to kill him for this. Then Reynir will resurrect him and spend maybe ten minutes trying to lecture him about unnecessary risks through tears until he just gives up and hugs him breathless. 

In the near-distance, he can hear the howl of more trolls and beneath that, the fainter shouts of his colleagues. Some of them sound like his name- though that may just be his imagination. Fingertips of a fire balanced high in the trees leap for the sky some two kilometres away. Emil will be no good to anyone with weeping wounds, so he shuffles over to a fallen tree and sits, stretching his legs out. He opens the medical pouch on his hip and fishes out a piece of gauze, which he wets with his water-skin and uses to scrub his wounds clean.

The faster he cleans his knees and hands the faster he can get back to the battle. Sigrun and Reynir will need the help. Bandaging his own hands proves difficult, but this is not the first time he has had to patch himself up. Nor will it be the last time. Especially if he plans to make a habit of stupid moves like the one he just pulled- he’s just glad Sigrun wasn’t around to see that, though he’ll have to tell her to explain why a giant troll-splat over by the old trick cliff needs Cleansing.  
Briefly, Emil wonders if he should have died. Should he have fallen to his death, cushioning the fall for the troll? It seems a miracle of physics and timing that his hands met the rope at all, let alone hung on without the benefit of gloves to protect his palms from renting open. With one hand still open and bleeding, Emil touches the pendant again. It has a name he cannot begin to pronounce, even with his new grasp on Finnish. At the end of the winter season, the morning before Lalli and Tuuri left for Finland again, Lalli took the pendant off his neck and placed it around Emil’s.

“What does it do?” Emil squinted at the charm in his palm. His previous experience with Reynir’s runes catching fire left him with a healthy suspicion of magical iconography.

“It keeps you from dying, hopefully.”

“Does it make me flame-retardant or something?”

“No. It’s a protective symbol. You’re now less likely to be crushed or shot. It just makes you a little luckier with things like that.”

Maybe this charm around his neck is the reason he survived. Emil likes the idea of the charm acting as a buffer between him and everything that wants to kill him, including his own stupid choices.

The daylight is failing. He needs to be back among his colleagues before the moon replaces the sun, or he won’t survive the night. Not in this season.  
When the bleeding is staunched and the bandages are tied off, Emil gets up and jogs towards the sound of the battle. “Bet Lalli doesn’t have to deal with shit like this.” he mutters under his breath.

 

 

(Mikkeli, at the edge of the dead-wood outside the new settlement)

“In two weeks this thing has taken two cows, five sheep and seriously wounded a healthy draft-horse. The folks out here need every piece of livestock they’ve got, so we’d better find what’s killing them and kill it. Besides that…the father of the child that went missing yesterday swears to the gods above and present that a creature matching the descriptions we have of the live-stock killer is what snatched his child away from him.”

Lalli doesn’t understand why the commander needed to say that. Everyone already knows they are here about the missing child. That is why the soldiers have been mobilised from their defence positons along the walls, why all mages in the area has been requisitioned from their normal duties for this. Lalli knew what was going on the moment he was pulled off hunting duty. His superiors know he will always deliver on a hunt. When he is assigned the target of a giant recently spotted in the area or a water-beast that’s harassing the fishers on the lake, he’ll bring back its head/s. It may take him a day or a few days. But there is never any doubt that when the youngest Hotakainen is pointed towards a troll and told ‘kill’, eventually he’ll slink back with blood on his hands. 

Also, there’s a god standing right next to him. The authorities of Mikkeli wouldn’t request a god’s presence unless this was a big deal. Missing-child and child-snatching-monster big deal. 

The god’s name is Kuutar. When the gods first appeared on this plane towards the end of the last winter, Kuutar made a point of seeking Lalli out.

“I always enjoyed your prayers. Simple and to the point. I don’t enjoy flattery in a mage’s technique. It’s so crude. If a mage wants the help of a god then they should just ask instead of trying to appeal to our admittedly swollen egos. Don’t you think?”

Lalli didn’t respond at all because he had not been expecting a god to appear over his shoulder in the mirror while he brushed his teeth. Then, when he found his voice, he thanked her for her help on the train last winter, to which she responded with a ruffle of his hair and a delighted “you’re welcome!”. As winter has thawed into spring something of a professional friendship has developed between them; the various authorities who need Kuutar’s help know there is a better chance of securing it if Lalli Hotakainen is also present for the task. For reasons no one in the upper echelons of the Known World’s governments can divine, Kuutar is very fond of that weird guy.  
After the work is done, Kuutar is apt to suggest they go for drinks or take a walk through the woods, and Lalli does not always refuse her offer. At least it’s a way to distract himself from missing the rest of his crew. Kuutar is no Reynir, but her occasional visits keep Lalli from chewing his limbs off from boredom and social isolation. She has her own charms, he’s sure, but it is a little bit difficult to judge the personality of another person when that person happens to be a god. They’re tricky and secretive. Lalli half-suspects Kuutar has gained his semi-friendship so she can add him to some kind of divine man-harem. She often makes a point of mentioning how much she likes his grey hair.

They are at the back of the group receiving the address, where Lalli prefers to be. Kuutar stands close beside him. Too close. Whenever she shifts her weight from one foot to the other she bumps into him. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that Kuutar is eight feet tall. It is no small thing when an eight-foot woman bumps into you. Lalli does not intend to allow her to knock him on his ass for the second time tonight, so he stands his ground, firmly planted in the carpet of ferns and soft dirt.

“Lord Kuutar has been so good as to consent to helping us with this,” The commander pauses as all heads swivel around to look at Kuutar. Most dip their heads respectfully. The one Dane among them is still so terrified of Kuutar that she loses her capacity to stand when she looks at Kuutar, and swoons the moment their eyes meet. Once the Dane has been picked up and dusted off, the commander continues “It is thanks to Lord Kuutar that we have a bright moon tonight. We know the beast runs from any kind of fire-light or artificially generated light like flash-lights and brands, so stick to the moonlight. Every soldier will break off into pairs. Mages will go alone- yeah, yeah, Virtanen I know it ain’t convenient. But we need to cover as much ground as possible. This thing has to be caught tonight.”

Lalli groans inwardly. While it is true that he prefers to work alone (among troupes of idiots like this one, anyway), the prospect of trudging through a dark and infected wood on his own while he searches for some monster with a penchant for stealing cows and kids does not sound like a pleasant evening in the making.

“What a dick,” says Näkki “I can’t believe she’s pulling this. I mean we’ve got the literal incarnation of moonlight right next to us, and she wants us to scramble through the dark alone? Do we have a mage union? I’m gonna make you write to our mage union.”

Hush Näkki, says Lalli, I’m trying to listen.

Näkki’s complaint disturbs no one else, because Näkki is the incarnation of Lalli’s magical soul and can be heard nor seen by no one else unless he consciously chooses to be seen. He prefers to stay invisible to all but Lalli most of the time. Näkki is a sadist of the highest order and enjoys tormenting Lalli’s already tenuous grasp on human communication by pouring doubt and confusion in one ear, and poisonous criticisms of their fellows in the other. Shortly after Näkki began to manifest and speak to him Lalli asked Onni if there was a luonto pound where he could trade Näkki in for something that talked less.  
Lalli suspects every moment of suffering Näkki has handed down to him since then is some kind of revenge for that slight.

“Kanerva and Pekkanen, divide up the east between you. The same for Patja-Makkar and Virtanen with the west. The south has already been searched with no traces. That leaves Hotakainen to take the north on his own.”

Lalli feels a knot of dread in his stomach.

“If this evening gets any worse I might actually cry.” announces Näkki.

A few faces turn towards him. The Dane topples over again.

The last of the mages speaks up; a scarred and chipper old man named Aatlo “No reason for Hotakainen to go alone, sir. I can accompany him.”

“No,” blurts Näkki, still privately, thank the gods “No we hate you. You never shut up about your stupid wife and grandchildren. Lalli, if we get stuck with him, I need you to sic me on him. I need to bite that stupid man’s stupid ass at least once before we die.”

Mercifully, the commander shakes her head “I need you to accompany the soldiers. They’re going to need some magical defence too before the night is out. And besides, we all know Hotakainen is more than capable of defending himself.”

This is why Lalli stands at the back of crowds; so when people start shooting dirty looks at him, they have to be ballsy enough to turn and look him in the face instead of just mugging at his back. Kanerva is the only one to do so. She shoots him a filthy glance over her shoulder, then trudges off in her assigned direction. Pekkanen follows with one last furtive look at Kuutar.

The look reminds Kuutar that she is here for a purpose other than being radiant and awe-inspiring. She clears her throat “And I will stay here. If anyone runs into some real distress, an attack by our mysterious friend, for example, call and I will do my best to intervene.”

The wave of relief is physical. Shoulders slump, grins return, the Dane’s legs give out again, and Lalli can see the soldiers are ready to psyche each other out. As the mages fan out in their given directions and the soldiers take orders from the commander, Kuutar hooks a large finger in Lalli’s collar and draws him back a bit.

“You especially,” she says in a low tone “Foul things seem to enjoy pursuing you.”

Lalli shrugs “It’s as it should be. Most of the foul things here were made because of my grandmother. It’s my burden to bear.”

Scoffing, Kuutar rolls her luminous white eyes “I think the main reason these things chase after you is because you look like Ensi was slapped on a photo-copier with the setting on ‘younger male’.”

“What the Hel is a photo-copier?” asks Näkki.

“Ah, never mind- I do wish you hadn’t taken off your hannunvaakuna, though.”

“A friend needed it more.”

“Yes, well, the next time you’re making romantic gestures for your boyfriend-”

“He’s not my boyfriend.” says Lalli wearily. This subject has been so beaten to death that he is seriously considering beating Kuutar to death if she brings it up one more time.

“Yet.” adds Näkki.  
Lalli makes a mental note to get him for that later.

“Give Emil something a little less heirloom-ey and protective.” finishes Kuutar “And be careful.”

He nods “You too.”

Lalli turns from the group and Kuutar’s halo of radiance and steps into the dark woods. Already, he can hear the low wails of ghosts nearby.

 

 

(Y 92. Still outskirts of Dalsnes, but a little closer than before)

Jogging with two torn knees is a lot harder than Emil hoped it would be. The pain is the kind that makes him imagine there’s a little imp on each knee, working away at the flesh and muscle with a cheese grater. He knows the wounds are far more superficial than he has any right to hope after the fall he took, but damn, is it still painful. Wounds on joints always are.  
Still, Emil bears it up well. With the kind of job he has been working this last year and a bit, and the kind of crazy sparring partner he has (Sigrun also uses him to bench-press when she’s in the mood for a challenge), Emil has spent his time in almost constant pain. Little bruises and stinging cuts and the like. In the Cleansers, he got beaten up a lot, out on the job, and sometimes by the youngest of his colleagues. And before that…

Emil is not a stranger to pain. 

What really puts him on edge is the thought of what he might find when he finally catches up with the battle. He has already gone more than two kilometres and the battle shows no signs of slowing down. Scars from explosions litter the terrain. Full corpses and little pieces of troll are showered in his path, flanked by small, spitting fires that chew on troll meat. Overhead is a more serious fire burning in the canopy- looks like the rookie Cleanser took a wild shot again. These fires serve as his main source of light. Tonight, the moon is dark. Whoever’s up there, be it Kuutar or Máni, has better things to do than shine on beaten Cleansers in the Norwegian wilds.  
All the more reason to catch up with the battle: a forest fire could start if they don’t take care of this soon. Reynir can pray for rain, Cleansers will take care of the big splat Emil made and then everyone can go home to rest up.

That is assuming the trolls don’t get to Dalsnes first. When Emil realised the battle was retreating towards Dalsnes, he had to stop and throw up. His nerves were just too strained for him to hold onto the idea of Dalsnes’s destruction without forcing something else out. Dalsnes is his home, second only to Mora.  
So he forces himself to run faster. Hurts like Hel and he only has half an idea of where he’s going. He stumbles in the dark many times, but never injures himself. He must have the pendant to thank for that. The rumble of battle draws closer, becoming louder and louder until it is a roar, and Emil’s eyes are seared with the fire they’re leaving in their wake. Maybe 200 metres ahead of him are the shadows of trolls and soldiers clashing amongst sheets of fire. Their numbers are less than they were when they set out. 

A dark thought crosses his mind; two red heads crushed inwards, and he finds the strength for an extra burst of speed.

“Keep shooting!” the familiar voice seems within arm’s reach “Hold off on the fires!”

“Sigrun!”

She does not hear him. She is up on the back of a huge troll that looks like it might have once been a bear and busily hacking through the layers of fat on the head to get a shot at the brain. Behind her is an absolute wreck of a battle. He sees soldiers back-to-back, just barely holding off attackers on all sides. The rookie Cleanser’s lost her weapon and is now fighting for her life with a sword she obviously has had no training with. There are perhaps no more than a dozen left of the twenty-three that set out.  
Emil scoops a rock from the ground and tosses it at a troll coming to the aid of the one Sigrun is on. It bounces harmlessly off a thick layer of goop over its skull, but Emil has its attention now.

“Come here you bastard.” he growls.

“Em!”

Reynir comes out of the shadows and tosses Emil a rifle- his own rifle. Emil blows the troll’s primary head off and aims for the secondary as it lumbers on.

“Are you alright?” shouts Reynir “Where’s your rifle?”

“Had to drop it to run. I fell off a cliff.” 

“Oh, ok!” an incandescent golden light is pouring out of Reynir’s eyes and mouth, which looks really weird under his mask. He points at a large troll and the light whips out of him, wrapping around the troll’s fat neck. The troll’s head flies off like a cork shooting off a champagne bottle and lands right in Sigrun’s lap, who screeches it and stabs it a few times before she realises it is dead already.

“Gods-dammit Reynir! Stop doing that!”

Emil squeezes off another shot and nails the helper troll in its secondary head. Finally, it goes down.  
Sigrun leaps off her prey a moment before its body slumps to the ground. Only then does she notice him.

“EMIL YOU DORK WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN I’VE BEEN LOOKING ALL OVER FOR YOUR CORPSE- DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW HARD IT IS,” she takes the gun out of his hands and pops a troll between its many eyes “TO FIGHT AND CORPSE-SEARCH AT THE SAME TIME? WHERE UNDER THOR’S BLUE SKY WHERE YOU?!”

“Trick-cliff.” he wheezes “Can you be mad later? Can we just fight now?”

“Fighting is good!” adds Reynir with an edge of manic terror.

“No,” Sigrun sighs “No more fighting. Reynir, work me up one of those glowey barrier things.”

“But Dalsnes-” he begins.

“Reynir!”

A puddle of light spreads around Reynir’s feet and arranges itself into a rotating circle of runes. Immediately, the trolls near Reynir reel back, issuing groans of disgust or fear.

Sigrun shoots another troll in the face “Fall back to the glowey thing!”

The rookie Cleanser bolts into the expanding circle and cowers behind Reynir. Two, three, five of the soldiers follow her in, and then Sigrun shoves Emil into Reynir’s arms and says “If you come out of the glowey thing I will shave you bald.”

“Lieutenant Colonel, we can still fight!” a soldier named Sven protests “We can fight to the last man!”

“The Hel we can!” snaps Sigrun “Too many of us are dead and it’s not doing any good. I won’t have the rest of this outfit throwing itself into the Rash’s mouth! Reynir, send Nanna-Elka to the base! Let the sentries know what’s coming.”

Reynir’s face screws up in grim concentration. Emil feels something like a chill pass through him from Reynir and hears a faint dog’s bark.  
The last soldier limps into the circle. At last, Sigrun darts inside. She wraps an arm around Emil’s shoulder and squeezes quickly, then lets go to resume shooting.

“Sweet baby Frejyr,” breathes a woman named Parmida “There are at least thirty of them.”

“They keep coming.” whimpers the rookie Cleanser.

“Gods-dammit. I should have got us out of here the moment this started.” growls Sigrun.

Reynir pats her on the shoulder with a trembling hand “You couldn’t know it was going to get this bad.”  
The advance of the trolls is a thick black river. They move with a real purpose. The smallest of them dart between the propulsion instruments of the tallest of them, and scrabble over the backs of the huge crouching things with bellies that drag. The trolls part and flow around Reynir’s circle. They cringe back and press into each other, away from the golden light the circle issues. Some are knocked back into trees that groan in protest. Others cower behind their neighbours to avoid the burns the light sears into their liquid hides.

“This isn’t right.” says Emil.

“Yeah, Em, I know. It’s shit.” 

“They’re going past us. They should be trying to get in.”

Sven’s face darkens “Hey, he’s right.”

“What do you mean? We’re in a mage’s barrier. Nothing can get in here.” rumbles an enormous woman named Katja.

“But they should be trying.” counters Emil “Every time I’ve ever got in one of these the trolls have piled up around us and tried everything to get in.”

Reynir nods, his braid bouncing “Normally the biggest ones body-slam the rune until cracks start showing. They could break through if they really tried. I’m not as strong when Nanna-Elka’s not here.”

“Who the fuck is Nanna-Elka?” squeaks the rookie.

“My fylgja. She’s on her way to the headquarters. She’ll talk to the mage on guard duty so Dalsnes is ready for what’s coming.” Reynir swallows with some difficulty “She’ll make it.”

Finally, it dawns on Emil, what’s been bothering him “They’re running away.”

“What?” Sigrun gives him a strange look.

“Not from us. There’s something else coming…they’re running away from it. Something like what came after me. Bigger than we’ve ever seen.”

Sven nods “That makes sense. That’s why they aren’t trying to get in here.”

“Then we should run,” says Sigrun “Because whatever they’re running from is also coming for us.”

 

(Mikkeli, inside the dead-wood outside the new settlement)

“Not to be the prissy luonto, but if one of those nasty things touches me I will scream.”

Just don’t look at them, advises Lalli, I’m not.

“How can you not stare at these things? It’s like, fuck, I don’t know. I’m freaking out.”

I noticed.

“And by extension that means you’re freaking out too. We shouldn’t have come back.”

We have a responsibility to this place.

“You do realise that not all of Grandmother’s screw-ups have to be ours as well? We are a grown-ass mage who can make his own mistakes.”

We also have to accept responsibility for family mistakes.

“Accepting family mistakes means wandering through a dead-wood where our whole childhood home died? I don’t accept that. I think you’re the real sadist here.”

You mean masochist.

“I mean fuck you. I’m writing to the luonto union and requesting a transfer.”

You do that.

Näkki does have a point, however, at least where the ghosts are concerned. Lalli has never seen a crop of more despondent or ragged ghosts. They drift like trash on a tide, oily, torn, soaked with a liquid like tar or old troll’s blood. Whenever one passes through a bright shaft of moonlight, their colour darkens from a wispy black to the gangrenous hues of a frostbite wound. Thankfully, they are only vaguely human in shape. Lalli could be ducking underneath the ghost of his father and never know the difference between him and some other anonymous spectre.  
Small mercies. For fear of touching any of the ghosts, Näkki clings to Lalli in a way he hasn’t since he was a kitten, frightened of the world that lurked beyond the safety Lalli promised. A fully-grown luonto clinging to his mage’s back is a rare sight. Lalli is sure Näkki would have feigned braveness if they were not alone, and is therefore glad to be alone. 

“I’m glad Tuuri isn’t here for this.”

Lalli vaults over a fallen tree and says, she isn’t prepared to see things like this yet.

“I don’t think she ever will be. I wish the gods would take back the Sight.”

Don’t say that.

“You think it’s a useful gift?”

I didn’t say that, Lalli says, I think it’s a necessary gift. The gods needed a way to introduce themselves that would leave no doubt about their power and their intentions to help humanity.

“I guess so,” concedes Näkki “Hey! Whoa, whoa, don’t put your foot down!” 

Lalli freezes in mid-stride and has to catch himself on a branch. Just beneath his hovering foot is a puddle of dank, dark muck, festering into the spring grass. It is silvered in the moonlight so Lalli cannot quite divine its colour. The stuff resembles the filthy slime trolls wear, but he can tell this is more like syrup than clotted blood. Like a secreted mucus.

Näkki shudders “Let’s not step in that.”

That must be from our target.

Taking a step back, Lalli crouches to get a better look at the puddle. He picks up a stick and pokes the tip into the puddle. When he tries to tug it back, the stick won’t budge.

“It’s like glue. Should I let Kuutar know?”

Lalli shakes his head: we don’t have a track yet. There’s nothing to follow.

“Hey…maybe we’re looking in the wrong place? I mean, it leaves a convenient puddle of muck here, but no footprints? Maybe it’s dripping like the ghosts are…so that would mean it’s in the trees or something.”

Shivering, Lalli glances up into the canopy over their heads. He sees nothing.

“There’s another.”

Lalli looks up. From this angle he can see at least five more puddles. Their colour allows them to blend into the shadows almost seamlessly, except for the few that catch the moonlight. Even those look like moon-gilded ferns at a glance. Lalli suspects he wouldn’t have seen the traces of muck if he hadn’t blundered into one.  
The muck streaks tree-trunks. It collects in the shadows beneath trees, clings to the stalks of wildflowers. 

“Lempo almighty, where is all this coming from?”

Don’t know. You better get inside.

For once, Näkki doesn’t argue. He makes himself a mist and sinks into Lalli’s ribcage, where Lalli can feel him squirm and toss restlessly.

“Call Kuutar.” says Lalli.

On it, says Näkki. 

Then there is a noise like a throat tearing open, a clawed hand reaches up from the muck and grasps Lalli about the ankle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh look, Lalli made a friend.


	3. The troubles of the waking world

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some of us will recognise ourselves in Tuuri and her writing habits. Also, Sigrun's grandma believes in cryptids

“…because the gods’ descent was first announced with the gift of Sight afforded to all those with Finnish blood or nationality, military strategy is predicted to turn increasingly towards magically-based attacks and defences. Much of this is predicted to involve participation from the gods themselves. Additionally, conditions which were previously mysterious and untreatable, such as Jonsdöttir Syndrome and IID, can now be explored and explained through the use of the Sight. In this way the non-magical medical spheres will also be impacted by the new abundance of the Sight, to the extent that the non-magical and magical medical industries can be expected to experience more and more overlaps until they join into one- son of a goat!”

On the other end of the connection, Mikkel laughs “You might consider editing that part out.”

“Hold on, I just spilled tea all over my leg.”

Cursing again in Finnish, Tuuri seizes a handful of tissues from the tissue box and crams it over the lukewarm tea dripping down her naked leg. She scatters more on the ground to absorb the puddles and ends up stepping on a soggy tissue the moment she puts her foot down.

“Shit,” she gets on her knees and swipes the tissues over the spreading puddle “This is why I shouldn’t drink and write. I’m not even wearing trousers, I could have burned myself.”

“Why aren’t you wearing trousers?”

“Because Mikkel, when I write my papers, two things need to be free. My imagination and my thighs.”

Once the mess has been cleaned, Tuuri returns to her chair and hunches over her papers “Where was I? Let’s see, blah, blah, blah, medical sphere- oh, here. I wanted to ask you about the wording. Do you think I should talk about the Sight as much as I have?”

Papers rustle as Mikkel flicks through his notes “You can’t discuss anything magical without discussing the Sight these days. Are you worried about causing offence? You’ve never been worried about stepping on toes before.”

Tuuri laughs bitterly “I’ve never had the prospect of stepping on divine toes before. I can’t afford to offend the gods in my academic work- the gods might turn their backs on the theories that I put forwards if they think I’m making fun of them. Seriously, I’m freaking a little bit. Lord Kuutar is pulling a real Reynir on Lalli over here. She likes him. Honestly, I wonder if she’ll to try to spirit him away into some kind of divine man-harem.”

“Man-harem?” repeats a derisive female voice, softer for being in the background “What are you two talking about?”

“Nothing much, Mets, just the fate of the medical world. How was training?”

Tuuri can almost hear the dismissive shrug on the other end “Boring. The instructors are condescending and dull, so it was kind of like being at home with you.”

“Very funny. Go on, get finished with your homework. I’ll finish mine and we can walk the dogs together before it gets any darker.”

“Joy.” says Mette flatly “Hi, Tuuri.”

“Hi Mette.” and once she is sure Mette has stomped upstairs, she drops her voice to a low, conspiratorial tone “Has she been fighting again?”

“I don’t see any new bruises on her face. I think she’s fine.” but there is an obvious note of concern in Mikkel’s voice.

“Chin up ‘Kel. I rebelled against Onni all the time when he was bringing me and Lalli-cat up, and I can guarantee, that disdain Mette’s got for you right now will turn on its head as soon as she leaves school and realises how much you’ve done for her.” Tuuri clears her throat again, aware of being out of her depth. What does she think she’s doing, giving familial advice? 

There is a pause of fifteen seconds that seems to last for years, before Mikkel speaks again “You might consider focusing on IID instead of Jonsdöttir.”

IID, or Inexplicable Instant Death, is a condition which was previously blamed on stress or some kind of malfunction in the brain. There aren’t exactly neurosurgeons around to explain what kind of role the cerebral tissues might play in causing a person who is, usually, of sound health and mind to be alive and alert at one moment and stone dead the next. This normally happens around abandoned buildings or derelict cities in the Silent World. Cleansers have the highest rate of IID, so for a while it was thought that something in the smoke that is produced by burning the Rash was killing off the odd Cleanser. Not enough to raise an issue of, of course, beyond equipping Cleansers with a breathing mask that also defended against the Rash.  
Since the entirety of Finland can now see ghosts as easily as any mage, the cause of IID is just common knowledge by now. Ghosts, stealing into a healthy body in an attempt to either communicate or possess the body for themselves. The initial contact caused the person to keel over in an imitation of death, with a bare whisper of a pulse and the faintest rate of breathing so that it was almost undetectable. Prolonged contact, say, ten minutes, caused irreversible death.

“What’s wrong with Jonsdöttir?”

She hears Mikkel’s chair creak as he shifts his weight “There hasn’t been a confirmation of any magical involvement in that syndrome yet. It’s a sensitive issue.”

Tuuri rubs her forehead, where the beginnings of a headache have formed “How else do you explain a foetus surviving to term in an infected mother? It’s got to be the blessings of one of the birth or fertility gods. An infected mother’s body would probably cut off all oxygen and nutrients to supply its own tissues. The body goes into crisis mode.”

“I think it’s best to steer clear of the subject until we receive an official statement from the gods themselves.” 

She snorts “Listen to us. ‘Official statement’, like they’re the new government or something.”

“You said you wanted to avoid offending gods. I’d recommend excluding Jonsdöttir until the issue has been a little more, ah, prominent issue in the scientific community. Everyone is interested in preventing IID right now. Focus on that.”

They talk for half an hour more. Mikkel suggests changes, grammatical and technical, while Tuuri scratches away busily at her drafts. Every now and then they lapse into small talk: how is Bornholm, how is Saimaa, and the like. Tuuri feels the pangs of the team’s separation quite fiercely during these editing sessions. Having an entire radio (a ‘token of esteem’ from the Saimaa authorities presented to Tuuri when she moved over) in the apartment recalls the days in the Cat-Tank in the first place, and having Mikkel’s voice in her ear just exacerbates her home-sickness for the Tank and the team. Most of the time, they talk about business. Tuuri has deadlines and stresses and a neurotic lack of confidence about her academic ability. Mikkel has a fifteen year old sister to raise and a farm to run in the wake of his father’s untimely demise (frankly, Tuuri is surprised the Madsen father didn’t die before Mikkel hit his twenties, considering the man wrestled bears for fun), as well as an entire town relying on him to deliver their infants safely.

Together, they manage their stresses. They make each other laugh with anecdotes from their day. Mikkel encourages Tuuri to spend more time in the garages, working with the machines that she loves to give herself a break from all this thinking. In turn, she reminds him to take time off for himself so as not to self-destruct from over-work.  
At the end of their conversations, when she must switch her friend off and return to her ordinary life, Tuuri feels as alone as if she were the only woman on the planet. 

“Take care of yourself, and tell Lalli I’ll send him a copy of that article about magical conjugation. He needs to read a little more.” are Mikkel’s words of parting. 

He hangs up first, leaving Tuuri to slump back in her chair, deflated and defeated. She has just resolved to give herself a night off to cry into her pillow then on Lalli upon his return when there is a hammering at the door. Jolting from her seat, Tuuri stuffs herself into the nearest available piece of clothing, which proves to be the summer-dress Lalli repaired for her that morning. Dishevelled and chequered, Tuuri dashes to the door and pulls it open to find an unfriendly face on the other side.

“Kanerva?” Tuuri considers grabbing the rifle they keep in the umbrella stand “If you have some complaint against my cousin, take it to the proper authorities. I’m not about to duke it out again.”

Only after this is out of her mouth does she notice that Kanerva’s grimacing face is streaked with a substance not unlike troll muck.  
Tuuri springs back from the door “Oh my gods! You’re trying to infect me?”

“What?” Kanerva’s face comes to life with disdain “Of course not! I’ve been fighting to save your stupid life in the dead-wood, along with everyone else!”

Tuuri drops to her hands and knees and scurries to her room “Thanks, but until I get my mask on don’t you set foot in this apartment!”

She hears a faint curse and a stumble, and knows Kanerva is inside the house- everyone always trips over the uneven door-jamb “You have to come quickly. Your cousin found something. He needs your help.”

Crawling into her room, Tuuri dashes for the night-stand and fixes her mask in place. It is one of the newer models, the kind which can literally be hit with a hammer about fifteen times before they show any cracks. On the off-chance that Kanerva intends to break her mask and force Tuuri to lick her face, Tuuri will be safe. As an extra measure, Tuuri opens her top drawer and pulls out a pendant Reynir carved for her. The rune for ‘protection’ beside the rune for ‘strength’. Should Kanerva attack, Tuuri should be able to knock her out with a good punch to the jaw.

“Really, you have to come.” Kanerva has appeared in the doorway of her bedroom.

Before Tuuri can reply, there is a ferocious hiss from the top of her book-shelf. Both of them look up to see Kitty, her back arched, her eyes narrowed to slits and every hair on her body standing to attention.  
Her reaction is all the warning Tuuri needs.

“You may have just condemned me to quarantine for a week,” she says with an unexpected venom that makes Kanerva retreat “You know I’m not immune. Please leave.”

“This isn’t from a troll.”

Tuuri falters “Then what did that stuff all over your face come from?”

Shrugging, Kanerva turns and stalks towards the door “Ask it.”

 

(Dalsnes military headquarters)

General Eide, or ‘Mrs General’ as she is known on the base, is woken around ten to receive the news, and what remains of her daughter’s outfit. Dressed in harem pants and a baggy, faded Moomins night-shirt, General Eide watches the outfit arriving from the woods. She stands among the heavily armed sentries with a borrowed rifle, and despite her bedhead and pyjamas the sight of the General on the ramparts is immediately comforting.   
The gates are opened. The outfit are greeted by a swarm of medics, which the General must have summoned at Nanna-Elka’s behest. Reynir is peeled from Sigrun’s back, placed on a stretcher and sent off with a high-five from Sigrun. Exhaustion knocked Reynir to his knees half a kilometre from the outer-walls of Dalsnes; maintaining a powerful runo without a fylgja to help is no easy task for the most experienced of mages, so the medics are quite astonished that a mage with two years’ official training managed it for as long as he did. 

With an arm firmly around his shoulders, Sigrun steers Emil to the base of the wall and out of the way of the clamour of medics and injured soldiers. He turns his face to her shoulder and wills the rest of the world away. He moves on automatic, letting Sigrun guide him from the gates, tuning out the Eides’ harried conversation in favour of the rush of blood in his own ears. This is a foul kind of exhaustion, spiked with pain and a peculiar kind of hopelessness he has not felt for a long time. Not since he lived in Östersund.  
Eventually, he becomes aware of his name being spoken. He composes his face and raises his head. At some point Sigrun steered him into a room full of the Generals and higher-ups that populate the government of Dalsnes, all of them gathered around a table of maps and charts with serious expressions. Most of them are clad in pyjamas like General Eide and the others are either in office clothes or dressed for sentry duty. Evidently, they were all just pulled from their work or beds to be here. Emil has the faint notion that he might be expected to explain what he saw and wishes for a hole to open up beneath him to spare him the trouble.

Sigrun still has a grip on him “…incredible physical strain and trauma today. It might take him a moment to snap out of it.”

“I’m awake.” says Emil.

All eyes turn on him. Emil is very aware of looking like he was chased through the woods and dropped off a cliff.

“Describe it.” orders General Larsen, a stocky, angry man with more scar tissue than face and reputation for making his troops cry.

“What?”

“The troll you led away. We understand you availed yourself of the trick-cliff,” for no purpose other than punctuation, General Larsen slams a fist on the table and makes Emil jump “A most foolish choice!”

Emil glances down at his sloppily bandaged hands “It was either that or, uh, I died.”

A woman clears her throat- her name is Hossieni, her area of authority being provisions of both food and munitions “Tell me, did you manage to injure it?”

“Not until it hit the bottom of the cliff. I fired a few shots, but I couldn’t see anything like a head.”

“What features could you see?” demands Larsen with another thump of his fist “Legs? Eyes? Arms? Head? What kind of animals was it composed of?”

He has only a fuzzy image of grey flab and troll mucus, and says as much.

“How is it,” this General is named Josang and is clearly not impressed with Emil “That you managed to stay ahead of this giant for almost an hour without once getting a good look at it? Not even when it initially attacked your outfit?”

“I didn’t wait for it to catch up for me.”

Sigrun squeezes his shoulder in warning, but there’s a ghost of a smile in the corner of her mouth.

“And when it initially attacked the group, I was further away from them. I saw it advancing on the rear and attracted its attention.”

“And how did you attract its attention?” Hossieni again.

Is there a graceful way to say that he screamed like a toddler and threw stones? There is not.  
“I threw rocks. And shouted. I made of nuisance of myself until the troll couldn’t ignore me any longer.”

“We understand the herd of trolls turned away from Dalsnes. Why do you think that was?”

To his embarrassment, Emil has no better answer than a half-assed shrug. He is so tired. A deep kind of tired, a kind of tired that might pull him to his knees.  
“All I know is what happened. Reynir- ah, Árnason’s runo kept them at bay. Lt Colonel Eide was determined we weren’t going to be trapped outside in the siege we thought was coming, so we walked with the herd…in the middle of the herd, in fact.”

One of the senior mages takes an interest for the first time. Their name is Mikkelsen, and they terrify Emil in ways he did not know humanity could inspire terror “Without his fylgja?”

Emil nods. He does not trust himself to speak; any attempt at vocalisation in this intimidating person’s presence will probably result in a squeak.

“His fylgja warned me of what you thought was coming, and was not restored to Árnason until he came back through the gates. The runo was weak, then?”

Seeing that Emil has been reduced to his usual state of quivering terror by Mikkelsen’s presence, Sigrun steps in “No, the runo kept the herd away like it was made of fire. They didn’t touch us once on our way back. Arnason didn’t let up on the runo either. The herd only started to follow the shore away from Dalsnes when we were about a third of kilometre from home, and even after that he held it intact.”

“So you’re telling me Arnason held a runo together for kilometres, big and strong enough to protect about a dozen people, without his fylgja’s help?”

Emil squeaks an affirmative. Their face thoughtful, Mikkelsen leans over the maps once more and makes a note in the margins of one of them. 

Hossieni turns her attention to Sigrun “And what did you see of the beast?”

“Nothing, until Emil started up. It was remarkably stealthy until it started to chase after him.” Sigrun swallows with some difficulty “Sirs, if you’ll permit me to conjecture, I think we might be dealing with something that has an intelligence independent of the Rash.”

A ripple of unease passes around the table. The gathered faces grow even darker and grimmer. Emil wants so badly to sleep that he considers settling down on the papers that cover the table. Some sleep would be worth the terror of almost sitting in Mikkelsen’s lap

General Eide is the next one to speak “Do you think this might be a situation like the ghost herding trolls that you faced in the last weeks of the Long Winter?”

“No Mom- ma’am, no ma’am, otherwise our mage would have sensed it. Árnason didn’t detect any more ghosts than the background level, nothing malevolent at all.”

“You both have described this troll as being of an exceptional size, yet none of the outfit noticed that? How is that possible?” the cool look on Josang’s battle-pocked face is enough to send a shiver up Emil’s spine.

But he finds himself standing a little taller, speaking with a little more authority “That’s a good question. Lt Colonel Eide is an accomplished fighter. In our time together on the Long Winter, I never once saw her surprised by an event or attack of any kind (except, he thinks privately, for the fight with the water beast, the time she threw her arm in front of Reynir’s face and got it chomped, the time Reynir popped out of the rations crates and that time she stepped in the pitfall trap Lalli set up while we were waiting for pick-up), so the fact that there is some kind of troll that can sneak up on her should be very concerning to us all, especially because that troll was a giant. Even more so because it decided to chase me rather than to attack the rest of the outfit. Generally, trolls stalk and kill whatever is most convenient and I assure you I was a good 50 metres out of reach when it noticed me. The closest member of our outfit was perhaps 30 metres away. What kind of trolls sacrifices convenience for satisfaction? Trolls aren’t smart enough to be malignant, but this one had every intention of catching me. It was stealthy right up until I pissed it off, then it threw caution to the wind and tried to eat me. I mean, being able to lead the troll off the cliff makes sense to me, given what we know about troll behaviour, but something about the rest of it doesn’t add up to me. It was almost like the giant had a temper.”

A thick silence falls on the room. General Eide drops her face into her hands and mutters inaudibly. Wary glances are exchanged between neighbours, feet shuffle nervously and General Larsen thumps his fist a few times as he mulls over what he has been told.  
Meanwhile, Sigrun looks at Emil with unguarded pride. He hasn’t seen her look at anyone that way before and it fills him with an unexpected warmth, which seems to give him the energy to stand on his own feet. He pries Sigrun’s hand off his arm, then thumps her playfully with his elbow to make sure she understands there is no ill will.

The silence ends when an old, hunched woman speaks from the back of the room. With such looming and impressively scarred figures surrounding her, Emil has managed to miss her little figure and clean face this whole time.  
“I wonder if this has not happened because of Tvereggen. Too much activity in that area might have stirred things we would rather not encounter.”

Suddenly, the room comes to life again.

General Larsen claps a hand to his forehead “Oh gods above, not this Jotun crap again.”

The old woman shuffles around the table and, to Emil’s surprise, threads her arm through General Eide’s, who smiles at her like she’s family. It then strikes Emil that he is looking at Sigrun’s grandmother. She doesn’t get talked about much. While Sigrun practically flung Emil at her parents (like a proud cat bringing a kill back to its humans), there was never any effort to get him to meet the grandmother. Given the looks Grandma Eide has received by merely raising her voice, Emil suspects she might be a lunatic.

Grandma Eide confirms this with her next sentence “I’m glad you said that, Larsen, my boy, because now I don’t have to ease you young idiots into it. The Jotun are back. They’re coming for our skulls.”

“Grandma,” says Sigrun brightly “How did you get in here again? You know you’re banned from the war-room…by order of the Norwegian government.”

Grandma Eide gives her granddaughter a warm smile “I have my ways, dearie. The King himself couldn’t stop me from entering this room.” she gives a conspicuous cough, and trains her old eyes on Emil. He notices with a jolt of surprise that Sigrun most definitely got her bright violet eyes from her grandmother.

“What you saw, pretty boy, is an infected Jotun. That’s why the ‘giant’ chased after you when you distracted it. A Jotun’s intellect is greater than that of the average human or spirit, and far more profound. While we humans are ejected unceremoniously from our bodies to while away the afterlife as meagre spectres, a Jotun’s mind may persist in its body and even maintain some control over whatever motor functions the Rash sees fit to leave. Indeed, what you saw was an intelligent, thinking creature, which is why it chased you. Jotun are man-eaters by instinct, you see, and there is no finer taste to the pallet of a Jotun than the sweet taste of mountain-bred, pampered, blond Swede…except for perhaps mountain-bred and raven-haired Pakistani. I lost my hunting partner to a Jotun when I was no older than you yourself,” Grandma Eide casts a teary glance skywards “Poor Hassan. The relish with which those Jotun bastards ate him is something I can never forget.”

Emil shoots Sigrun a concerned look and gets a helpless shrug in response. The assembled generals and others are shaking their heads and tapping their feets impatiently, yet none of them interrupts her. 

“With all due respect Mrs Eide-”

“Ms Eide,” she says “I took Sigurd’s name, but we never officially married.”

“Uh, Ms Eide, with all due respect, I don’t think what I saw was a Jotun. It’s possible it was trapped up in the mountains like you say. We were close to Tvereggen when we were attacked, but in that case, maybe it’s just a herd of trolls that fused together? We don’t know what mountain giants look like because we just haven’t had the time to explore the mountains-”

Grandma Eide cuts across him with a good-natured laugh “I know what a mountain troll looks like, pretty boy! I’ve been defending this town and fighting on those mountains since before you were a glint in your father’s eye! What you saw was an infected Jotun. Now, I’ve observed that they tend to drop to all fours when they are infected, for better balance you see, but a normal and healthy Jotun is typically a blue-skinned mountain of a humanoid. Their blues vary in hues as much as our own proud species’ skin does, and they are all the more beautiful for it, much like us. But we are not two-story monsters with clubs the size of horses, so they will have us at quite a disadvantage whenever they chose to attack.”

Stooping, Sigrun whispers to him “Why don’t you scoot off to the hospital? Go bunk with Reynir ‘cos you’re sure as Hel not gonna get any sleep in the dorms. I’ll take it from here.”

He does not need to be told twice. Emil leaves Grandma Eide to continue with her Jotun story and the others converse in low tones amongst themselves. It does not matter that it is dark, or that the town has taken to snuffing out most of the lights at night so as not to attract any of the generous surplus of trolls. He knows exactly where to go. The hospital is still lit up. He trudges through the dark to the raft of candles and electrics with the sound of the ocean in his ears.  
After a quick decontamination and a change of clothes, Emil shuffles into the hospital with his head down-cast so as to avoid attracting attention. The staff will assume that anyone visiting the hospital at such an ungodly hour has a good reason to be here, but Emil does not want to be recognised for who he is, least of all for what he has done today in case he is forced to tell the story for a bunch of bored night-staff. Reynir is not difficult to find. Men of the lofty height of 1.9 metres with red braids at least half that length do not blend into crowds.

He finds Reynir in a state of almost obscenely deep sleep. His long limbs are flung out like he is in the middle of a jumping-jack and for some reason he has taken his braid down to sleep. Anticipating a night of choking on hair and being poked by joints, Emil carefully turns Reynir over, scoots him to the edge of the bed and lays down with his back against Reynir’s.  
For at least an hour, in spite of his suffocating exhaustion, Emil stares at the mottled white of the privacy partition and thinks about how the news would have been broken to Lalli had he missed the rope today.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jotun is the word for ice giants, those big blue dudes (Loki's birth family in the Marvel CU) who live in Jotunheim. I think I'm using the right term, but if anyone knows otherwise then please let me know. 
> 
> So we're putting Mikkel in a parental situation. His youngest sister (according to the family tree), a dainty, angry maiden of 15, needs some raising. Sigrun fights stuff, Lalli scouts and fights stuff, Tuuri writes academic papers and Emil just kind of fights and burns stuff. And Reynir? Well Reynir's just a big old sweetheart


	4. A restless sleep, followed by literally violent nightmares

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reynir gets cuddled, Emil regrets his life choices and Lalli's haven is crashed by a blood-covered king

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mandatory mythology fact:a Lindworm is the Scandinavian dragon, as the Long is to China  
> Mandatory disclaimer: Yes I am a lunatic for mythology and everyone will be besieged by mythological cameos whether they like it or not.

(Somewhere pleasantly cool and quiet within the dreamscape)

What triggers his revival is anyone’s guess. It may be that he is asleep beside a mage. Perhaps the incredible stress of the day that has just come to a close in the conscious plane affected him so deeply it also stirred the survival instinct within this, the unconscious plane, enough to wake him from a cursed sleep. There is an off-chance that his longing to see a particular member of his old team, whom he must sense is nearby, has become so strong that his unconscious mind can no longer ignore the urge to seek Lalli out.  
Whatever the stimulus and whatever the reason, the king who has slept on uninterrupted for 92 years opens his eyes.

Emil thinks he is looking at the hospital, so his first concern is why someone has stuck a burning torch on the other side of the room. Secondly, where is Reynir? With a deep yawn, Emil lifts a hand to inspect the- good gods, does his back hurt! Like the bones have been replaced with broken glass or a metal pipe, extending from the base of his head to his tailbone in prickling agony. Gritting his teeth, Emil forces himself to sit up and rotates carefully from the waist. Vertebrae click and snap in protest. His pelvis crunches as if broken. A crack in his neck suddenly releases the tension in his head and neck and makes his ears pop.  
Birdsong washes over him and burns behind his forehead. Dust is heavy in the air along with a smell he cannot identify. When he sneezes into his elbow, he draws it back to find blood in the crook of a blue shirt he does not remember ever wearing. Blood? Dripping from his nose. His mouth is dry. Dehydration, which he somehow knows to solve by reaching for his belt where a little flask is clipped. Emil is perturbed. He has no idea how he got into these clothes nor where he is, or why it is so bright in this room that he has to squint to look around him in spite of there being only one torch, but hey, at least he has some water.

He wipes his mouth and bloody nose on a long blue sleeve, and inspects his clothes in a haze of confusion. These are not his trousers. He has never worn blue trousers or a mid-sleeved blue shirt with a cravat that shows too much of his chest for his liking (the cigarette burns on his pectorals, specifically), his hair is not this long, the soles of his hunting boots should not be encrusted with dried blood because he has non-immune bunk-mates, like Reynir, and he would never endanger their health by forgetting to clean the troll-gunk off his boots.  
Emil has absolutely no memory of ever owning anything wolf-related, so he finds it especially confusing that the rough pelt of a grey wolf has been draped around his shoulders, complete with a hood made of the head, so that the muzzle will cover his forehead if he were to pull it up. As is his habit when he is nervous, Emil runs a hand through his hair- or tries to, but his fingers bump up against something on his forehead. A circlet of either silver or white gold. Plain and dented and as comfortable as if it were made with his head in mind.

And to top it all off Emil has a braid for the first time since he was thirteen. He hasn’t had enough hair to wear a braid since then, let alone a braid almost as long as Reynir’s.   
By most accounts, Emil Västerström is an intelligent young man. He spent much of his formative years with a foot in his mouth or his head up his ass, but the expedition into the Silent World changed that. It removing him from his sheltered world and throwing him head-first into the kind of situation which he would either walk away from with an increased maturity, empathy for his fellow human beings and a greater general competence, or his remains would be swept into an envelope and sent to his family in Mora. 

Because he survived, one would expect a level-headed reaction from Emil Västerström in this situation. Here is a young man who has been bitten by ghost-horses and been puked on by trolls that could only be described as ‘ceiling pugs’. Here is a young man who met and accepted the magical world in the dead of a Danish winter. Here is a young man who gently drew a traumatised mage out of a thick shell with the simple benefit of his company, and fell in love with that mage in the deep way most people are not capable of feeling until at least three years into a relationship, and who managed to do it under the constant threat of death.  
Yet a simple, inexplicable change of clothes and location reduces Emil to a mess.

He stands and almost falls- his legs feel as if they have never been used before “What the Hel?”

Seeing that he was asleep on a long stone slab, Emil panics a little bit. Obviously he has been kidnapped and changed and either had a wig put on him or been held for so long his hair grew out naturally. He dives for a polished shield at his feet and checks himself for signs of advanced age. His face is the same as it ever was, apart from the braid, the circlet of white on his brow and the look on his face, like he has just been force-fed rotten meat.

At least he realises why the room is so bright. The shield at his feet is just one of many; one of a small tower of shields that spilled to the side, of ranks and ranks of battle-axes balanced along the circular walls of this place, stacks of spears and shields and swords, of a veritable carpet of daggers and knives so that he will not be able to take a step without tripping over a blade of some description. There are hammers, battle-helms and a few plates of armour.  
The only space in this little armoury that is not taken up by weaponry is his slab, which is nothing more than a raised platform, sort of like a sacrificial altar, where he has apparently been dozing. As Emil turns he feels something bump the back of his leg. Sweeping his cloak to the side, Emil sees a long and slim sword’s sheath strapped to his belt. The hilt of the sheathed sword is an undecorated black grip, just as the sheath is a plain thing of black cloth. In spite of the simplicity of design Emil knows he has a weapon of incredible significance on his hip. 

Emil takes a deep breath and backs to the edge of the slab “Ok, Em, you’ve been kidnapped. You’ve been kidnapped and dressed up as some kind of fairy prince.” he gives the braid a fierce tug, determined to pull the wig off. He is then briefly blinded by pain when his own scalp burns in protest “And that- that is your own hair. So you’ve been enchanted to have longer hair. That’s got to be it. Some sick pervert will come back in a few moments and try to live out their sick…uh, Ancient Norwegian prepper routine with you as the fairy prince.”

This presents him with several options. First, he could get back on the slab and lay in wait for his perverted abductor to come along, then stab the living Hel out of the bastard. Emil is not worried about taking down someone larger than his relatively dainty height of 1.7 metres. He has known how to fight off larger, stronger opponents since he was eight, when the beatings started in earnest.  
But he does not like the idea of laying immobile for however many hours it may take his captor to show up again.   
The second option? Well, there is birdsong, there is a breeze in leaves and grass and the sound of buzzing bugs going about their business. That means the walls are thin enough to allow a clear quality of sound into his prison. Ergo, Emil is perfectly capable of smashing his way through. Among the many invaluable things Mikkel taught him, like respect for the dead and when to keep his mouth shut, smashing through thin walls with a well-aimed shoulder charge is one of the techniques he uses most often.

After a certain amount of thumping to determine a good place for a charge, Emil figures two things out; the walls are made of earth and stitched together by roots, which means he had better cover his face and neck or risk being throttled, and that just behind his slab is a good spot to try his luck. Flipping the hood over his head, he fastens a clasp in the cloak at his neck and squares his shoulder for the first charge. Perhaps a more collected warrior would have realised that pushing the sleeping slab through the wall is a better idea than possibly dislocating a shoulder, but Emil heaves the slab out of the way, knocking over a line of spears, and gets to work.  
Mikkel would be through in one blow. Then again, Mikkel is a Danish farmer from Bornholm, and everyone knows Bornholm Danes are made out of the same stuff they used in the old world to build war tanks. Emil does his best, however, and his best is exceptional.

The dirt wall rents beneath him upon his third blow. A snarl of roots tangles his arms. A piece of grass gets in his mouth. Sputtering and struggling, Emil emerges into the cool air and soft sunlight of the dreamscape.  
Emil wriggles out of his wolf-cloak and peels roots and dirt from its fur, scanning his surroundings. He is surprised. Going by what he knows of kidnappings, the captors usually prefer to stash their victims in an isolated place that will be difficult to escape from on the off-chance that they escape from their prison. But this? This is a simple woodland. The ground is flat and grassy, and the only kind of steep terrain are the mountains in the far distance. His little earthen prison crouches in front of a deep wood, but Emil is not afraid to forge through it. The last year and a bit in Norway have taught him how to use the woods to hide, to hunt and to sleep, if need be. If his captor chases him in there then the bastard will quickly change from bloodthirsty to cowering.

“Uh,” says Emil “Ok.”

A flowered meadow in front of him, stretching on for about a kilometre until it meets the woods once more, and mountains glowering underneath a distant storm beneath that. The same deep wood behind him. Emil has never seen a place like this.

“I don’t know those mountains.” he says, perhaps to the wolf-cloak.

If he’s anywhere near Dalsnes then he should at least be able to smell the sea. The air is devoid of even a hint of sea-salt. If he is in the wilds that separates Dalsnes from the rest of the Known World, he should be able to smell smoke. A Cleansing outfit recently burned a trail that cut these wilds down the middle. He smells no smoke.

“Am I in Finland?”

There’s no way the Hotakainens would pull this kind of thing on him. Emil isn’t even sure what this is supposed to be. An elaborate prank? A test to determine how far he has come in his abilities, devised by Sigrun’s crazy grandmother? A mental break?”

And then it all becomes clear to him “Oh! That’s it. I’m having a nervous break-down. I’m just hallucinating.” relieved, he sits down in the grass and looks up at the blue-grey sky “I’m just losing my mind. Of course I’m losing my mind. This season has been crazy.”

Why else would he dream himself into a little earthen dome stashed with weapons, like the barrows that the Vikings of old were buried in? His subconscious has created a safe space for him in a nice, flowery meadow where he can wait out his mental break and later return to the surface of sanity, refreshed and alert. That also explains the braid; he has missed having long hair. The wolf-cloak? Emil doesn’t remember ever having a fondness for wolves, but perhaps he had a good experience with something wolf-shaped as a child, and his subconscious has offered him the cloak to return that old comfort to him.

Emil has just begun to convince himself of his mental break theory when the lindworm shows up. He smells it first- the rot of a troll, combined with motor oil and garbage. At once, the birds fall silent. He rises to his feet and peers around the barrow and there it is, staring him in the face with the glazed eyes of a sick animal.  
Lindworms are among Sigrun’s favourite animals.

“Rare as Hel,” she told him and Reynir over dinner one night “I’ve only seen two in my whole life. They’re usually peaceful animals, even though they smell like a sewer had a baby with a bottle of rancid machine oil. Since we’re going to be running around the woods this summer season there’s a chance of seeing one. If you do then just wave and smile and be on your way. They don’t eat people. Only carcasses. They’re like big smelly dragon-vultures.”

Big smelly dragon-vultures. Harmless. Stinky, but harmless. Yet looking at this lindworm and its sick eyes, Emil somehow does not believe this. Stinky, yes, but also capable of harm and quite eager to cause it. The sores that cover its plated, oily hide are unmistakable as the Rash. Pus and putrefaction ooze from blackened cracks in its armour. It opens its mouth and sighs a cloud of bloody breath, wafting an evil smell towards Emil. A swathe of grass beneath a popped and open, weeping belly rots before his eyes.

“Nope.” whispers Emil. 

He retreats around the barrow, snatches his wolf-cloak from the grass and edges inside the Emil-sized hole he made. Then, with a supreme effort, he turns the sleeping slab on its end and uses it to block the hole. He traps himself inside and traps the lindworm outside. Unless, of course, the lindworm still has brain enough to slam into the thin walls, which will most certainly crack like eggshells beneath its legs.

“Nope.” repeats Emil, assuming foetal position. He pulls a large shield over himself and wills his cruel subconscious to turn him into a turtle. Invulnerable to all attacks. Mighty and wise and untouchable within his shell.

“Emil?”

“I’m a turtle.”

“What are you talking about?”

Suddenly, everything is back to normal. He is in an acceptably comfortable hospital bed with an elbow in his left kidney, a strand of red hair in his mouth and Sigrun standing over him with an amused expression.

“Sorry,” he scrapes Reynir’s hair from his mouth and yawns “I had a weird nightmare. I was trying to turn myself in a turtle so I didn’t get eaten.”

“By what?”

He shrugs “Can’t remember. Probably a dog or something. What’s going on?”

She crosses her arms in front of her chest and glowers “Sorry to do this to you, but I need you to patrol with Mikkelsen.”

Emil lets out a whimper of protest.

“I know, you’re terrified of them. Just work with me on this. They want you to come along to see if you can identify any more of the kind of giant you saw among the dead trolls. Apparently, they’re not going to take my word that there was just one mega-giant out there.”

Swinging his feet to the ground, Emil stands slowly and stretches out his cramped arms “It’s fine. I’ll go get dressed- hey, have you slept yet?”

Sigrun clean and changed into her sleeping clothes, but the bags under her eyes are large enough that they could be used as a hammock. He is not surprised that she shakes her head.

Emil gestures to the bed and the sprawled mage in it. “You’ll conk out the moment your head hits the pillow. Just try not to sleep with your mouth open.”

Though he has only slept for three hours, Emil makes an effort to be pleasant and accommodating for Mikkelsen. Also not to betray the fact that his legs are trembling and that he is in the grip of mortal terror. Mikkelsen is by no means an intimidating person to look at. A long nose, a mouth disposed towards a permanent frown and angry eyebrows are nothing to inspire terror. Rather, the fact that Mikkelsen openly serves Hel is what Emil takes issue with, and the aura of death they carry around with them because of that.  
Come on. This mage has decided they will only channel the magic of a half-skeleton lady who collects dead cowards? How is Emil supposed to get around that when he spent a traumatising six months feeling the presence of death surrounding him at all times?

To cope with the proximity to Mikkelsen, Emil hangs at the back of the outfit as they leave the gates. No one attempts to talk to him, which he is glad of. 

“We’ll be using horses for this since we have a time crunch,” Mikkelsen gestures back at the gates, and right on cue a handful of horses trot out behind them “Try not to get them killed. They’re expensive.”

Emil ends up on a lovely stallion the colour of sea foam. He has no doubt Tuuri would kill as many times as necessary to obtain herself a horse like this. With his Cleansing equipment banging against his back and his eyelids tonnes heavier from lack of sleep, Emil props his forehead against the horse’s mane, yawning.   
He wonders if it is possible

 

“-to fall asleep on a horse?” Emil finishes his sentence in the torch-lit confines of his earthen armoury.

Lindworm funk hits him harder than one of Sigrun’s famous uppercuts and sends him reeling out from under the shield- his shell. The slab blocks the hole he punched out with his shoulder, but there are plenty of gaps around the edges for the lindworm to peer through. One diseased eye glares in at him.

“Don’t eat me!” Emil is surprised by the strength of his own voice “I’m nasty, alright? I sweat a lot and smell like a forest-fire all the time!”

The eye retreats. A second later, a massive wet thing covered with strands of black mucus slithers through the gap. Emil scrambles to the back of the barrow and presses himself against the far wall. The tongue keeps coming for him.

“I refuse to be taste-tested!” this does not deter the questing tongue. It moves this way and that like it has an intelligence of its own, coiling in on itself. It is more than long enough to reach him.

The sword? No- axe! A battle-axe’s hilt digs into his side, which is as much an invitation to chop and hack as Emil has ever received. Emil seizes the battle-axe, raises it over his head and strikes the advancing tongue with all of his might. Where the axe blade strikes the floor, it cracks deeply and shakes dust from the rafters. A spray of white sap-like blood hits Emil in the chest. Smells like honey.  
Letting out a choked howl that rocks the barrow, the lindworm withdraws what is left of its tongue, leaving a stream of white blood across the floor and a chunk of putrid flesh to wriggle in the middle of the cracked floor.

“Alright I didn’t think this out.” Emil hops across a few over-turned shields to avoid stepping in the blood or on the tongue. Once he makes it to the slab, he picks a tiny gap to peer through and sees the lindworm’s thick body encircling the barrow.

He has a sudden image of the dragon popping his barrow like a teen popping a zit between two fingernails. 

“Nope.” he cries.

Another shoulder-charge is in order- no, wait, he’s holding an axe. Emil picks a spot at random and slashes blindly, then almost falls on his face because the axe has passed through the wall like a hot knife through butter. The halves of the leaf curtain he has just slashed open billow to the side. Sunlight pours in majestically over the slimy hide of the lindworm that blocks his escape route.

“There was a door the whole time?” Emil curses, delivering another blow to the lindworm “Gods-dammit! I’m such an idiot! I compromised my shelter even though there was a fucking CURTAIN RIGHT THE HEL OVER HERE-” the axe comes down again, producing a hiss of pain from the lindworm “I’M A SCREW-UP IN MY NIGHTMARES TOO!”

The lindworm’s triangular head looms over him. The half-tongue it has left lolls out of its mouth. With a cry of pure rage that is directed more at himself than at the lindworm, Emil tosses the battle-axe. In a perfect world the axe would slam between the lindworm’s eyes and kill it dead. However, as this is most definitely not a perfect world by any stretch of the imagination, the battle-axe whizzes harmlessly past the lindworm’s ear.   
Taking advantage of the lindworm’s brief confusion Emil plants a foot in the bloody cleft he has made and launches himself up, grasping the lindworm’s face by the nostrils. Possibly the most disgusting thing he has ever done. As it bucks and prepares to slam him against the barrow wall, Emil swings up backwards (thank the gods for all those push-ups Sigrun makes him do) and lands crouched on the lindworm’s craggy forehead. 

He slides down its back and runs, grabbing the battle-axe as he goes. Barely weighs a thing for some reason, and he feels too attached to it now to leave it in the grass. Emil sets off for the woods, the lindworm in hot pursuit.

(Somewhere sheep-strewn and mountainous) 

Reynir reclines on in a soft bed of moss in the cleft of a rock. Today, he pushed his spirit and body further than it has ever been, and gods, is he feeling it. In a similar slackened, panting state of depletion, Nanna-Elka is slumped beside him.

“Let’s never do that again.” suggests Nanna-Elka.

“Well, I’m glad to know that we can do it.” Reynir squints across his haven, over the cloud of sheep that graze in the long grasses “This is the first time I’ve felt as strong as Lalli.”

“We’re stronger than Lalli.” points out Nanna-Elka.

He shrugs “Yeah, but this is the first time I’ve felt like I can do something with all that power. Lalli has better control over his stuff. Way better right now than when we were in the Tank, but we’ve still got less control, so we’re probably still weaker. I mean, what good is being powerful if it’ll just make us self-destruct?”

Nanna-Elka is about to say something wise and invaluable when an eerie noise drifts through the air. As one, the sheep lift their heads. Reynir sits up. Nanna-Elka’s ears perk.

“Did- did that sound like Emil to you?” she ventures.

“Yeah. I think so. That was his scared baby-man scream.”

A tense silence stretches on.

Reynir swallows on a dry throat “You know when I woke up about an hour ago? He was in bed with us.”

“Are we spooning?”

“No, Nanna-E. We’re doing the butterfly. I think he might be having a screaming nightmare?”

“He stopped having those last winter.”

“Well maybe they’re back,” he smiles reassuringly “After all, it’s not like Emil’s running around in the dreamscape, is it?”

The sheep drop their heads to graze once more.

 

(Somewhere not far from that sheep-strewn and mountainous place)

For the second time in twelve hours Emil is running for his life from an unspeakable terror. At least he is armed this time, with a battle-axe that seems to weigh about as much as a feather and a sword he has yet to draw. The way his luck is going at the moment, he’ll probably find a noodle attached to the hilt instead of a blade. 

These woods are flat and dense, which makes it a whole lot easier to run. He should be a torn mess from thorns and scratching branches, but the wolf-cloak is pretty good at deflecting those. The lindworm is a whole lot slower than the mega-giant was, so he has a fair head-start. All he needs to do now is find a nice place for a last stand, and a position to give him a strike that will finally cleave the monster’s forehead open.   
As he has run, he has seen some very strange things out of the corner of his eye. Transparent animals made of red light. Weird, chittering things hanging from the trees that make no anatomical sense. Once, he jumped over a brook and saw a naked woman languishing in the middle of it. No weirder than a Rash-infected lindworm chasing him from a Viking king’s barrow. 

Emil has little to no idea of where he is going or why he might be going there, but he is definitely following a path. He has the choice to run straight ahead- easier and faster. Instead, he zigs and zags all over the place like someone trying to remember a path which was once so familiar. Or like a man pushed too far by the last twelve hours who is about to lose his mind in a screaming melt-down. Both are distinct possibilities.  
Still, he seems to know where he is going. There are reasons he takes this left instead of that right, and ducks under this fallen tree instead of scrambling up that standing tree to make his last stand. His instincts guide him. Emil wishes his instincts would let him know where the Hel they are going, but hey, he isn’t dead yet, so that’s a plus.

Finally, he breaks through the woods into another clearing. The air here is charged- he feels the power in his teeth, in his bones. The land is at once and completely different. The trees, the water, the grass are all from a separate landscape. A thin stream of water flows in an unnatural circle around a grassy island. That’s an enchanted land if Emil has ever seen one.  
He splashes into the first thin stream and sinks in up to his chest with a shriek. He tosses the battle-axe to the shore and begins to heave himself out.

“Shit that’s deep!”  
Behind him, the lindworm growls an affirmative.

Scrambling onto the grass, Emil turns around, scooting backwards on his butt as the lindworm staggers towards the stream.

“Please be enchanted!” he begs the stream.

The moment the lindworm’s claw touches the water a wall erupts upwards out of the stream. On all sides, the water forms a roaring barrier that rushes to the sky and meets overhead in a low dome. 

“Thank the gods!” Emil sighs and collapses backwards. 

Outside, the lindworm hobbles back and forth, doing its best to pace in spite of the gaping wound Emil inflicted. 

“Safe,” says Emil with some smugness “Now scat. Go bother someone else, you abomination.”

Now that the immediate threat of death has disappeared, Emil is suddenly and violently exhausted. He wriggles out of his wolf-cloak, folds it into a pillow and conks out right there on the strange grass, completely failing to notice that Lalli is asleep only a few metres behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The couple that naps together snaps together. Spines, that is. They snap spines together.


	5. The murmurings of a half-conscious dreamer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For some reason I completely lost my appetite while writing this chapter.

Lalli is halfway through telling the story for the second time when Tuuri bursts into the room. Judging from the fog in her mask and the glint of panic in her eye, she clearly expected to find him prostrate on the ground with a cloth over his face. When she sees that Lalli is fine apart from a bruised nose and a battered ego, Tuuri ploughs through the crowd around him, all elbows and nails, and flings her arms around his neck.

“Thank the gods.” she mumbles.

“You’re welcome.” says Kuutar.

It is then that Tuuri realises the nature of the crowd she has barged into. Most of Saimaa’s government is here. Kuutar. The goddess of the moon, hanging onto the back of Lalli’s chair like a concerned parent watching over some childish project. The bleary-eyed mayor of Mikkeli stands beside the governor of the entire district, who is wearing a bathrobe and an expression on her face that suggests she would like nothing better than to go to sleep where she is. In the chair opposite to Lalli’s is an Admiral of the Finnish navy, known for his ability to steer a canoe expertly even in his sleep. Next to him is one of the most senior mages in all of Finland, whom Tuuri has only heard terrified whispers of from other mages when the time for testing rolls around, and they are required to stand in front of this intimidating person and prove they are fit to continue working for the government. Surprisingly, the head mage is a dumpy woman with dull eyes and a toadish mouth. The only thing to mark her out as someone of a superior position and power is the massive, decorative dagger stuffed into the waistband of her pyjama pants.  
There are scores of other authorities- almost half a dozen of the commanding officers of the navy and the army, all crammed into this little war room around an oak table and her tired cousin.

“What did he do?” Tuuri blurts into the tense silence. Who do I kill to make this go away, is the subtext.

“He caught something.” says the Admiral.

“What, a weird cold?” then into Lalli’s ear in a whisper “I told you to wear your coat. It’s still chilly.”

“No, his health is fine. He caught the creature that has been eating the livestock and such.” puts in one of the senior officers.

Tuuri glances down at her cousin. He looks back up at her. The only way his plea for help and sleep could be more obvious is if he had it written on his forehead. 

“What is it?”

This time it is the mayor of Mikkeli who speaks up “We were hoping you could enlighten us. You saw many things during the Long Winter, and when the gods gave Finland the Sight, in their wisdom (a reverent bow towards Kuutar), it was you who suggested the Cataloguing Programme. Thanks to your forward thinking attitudes the nation is well on its way to compiling a complete guide to the spirits and creatures of our land and how best to combat the unfriendly-”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Tuuri flaps one hand in a panic and clutches at Lalli’s shoulder with the other “I’m not an expert naturalist! I’m not even a mage. I’ve only had the Sight for a few months. You’re better off asking someone who knows what they’re doing! I’m basically just a suggestions box.”

“I don’t know what it is.” mumbles Lalli.

“Me either,” says the head mage, her river-rock eyes fixed on Tuuri “And let me tell you, young lady, I have seen some heinous shit.”

Tuuri’s mouth is dry. She regrets wearing the summer dress- so new and innocent of the knowledge of dirt, of bloodstains. Now she will have to wear it into a room that contains some kind of previously unrecorded horror. This is why she cannot have nice things.

“Show it to me.”

For some reason, these people think it is a smart idea to store the mysterious monster in the supply closet of the war room. Just beside some of the most important people in Finland, perhaps for the monster’s convenience? If it recovers its strength, there is a clutch of victims readily available. Before Lalli will let Tuuri get near to the thing, whatever it may be, he wraps her up in the shock blanket to protect her from contact with it. Given that he has literally fought it, Tuuri cannot imagine wearing the same blanket as her cousin will protect her from infectious materials, but there is an undeniable comfort in being swathed in soft wool as she sees the beast. 

Like a sapling was thrown into a tar pit. Like a bare skeleton wrapped in black bandages to protect its modesty. Like a tarnished black shield balanced atop a branching spear. The smell of mildew, damp and death blows out of the closet in a cloud the moment the door is opened. Tuuri scoots back rapidly and knocks into Kuutar’s legs.  
A lanky thing, twisted and folded in on itself as far into the corner as it can shrink. A rot-black body weeping profuse amounts of the same tar that smeared Kanerva’s face. The humanoid aspect of its shape is so vague that Tuuri is surprised to find it has a head and a face- a flat, squarish face with indents where a pair of sickly and dull yellow eyes stare. The stare is vacant; that of an animal who is too terrified to process thoughts or instincts. 

She takes Lalli’s hand and heaves herself to her feet, folding her arms tightly over her chest. 

“I don’t know what that is.” her hands tremble. She steadies them by snarling her hands in the folds of the blanket and wills her meals of the day to retreat to her gut “Like I said, you’re better off asking another mage or a scout. And if it’s of no inconvenience to you folks, I think I’m gonna take my cousin home and let him sleep this off.”

“I do have a problem with that, actually.” volunteers the Admiral “Your cousin is the only one we know of currently who has survived combat with one of these things. You won’t have heard the news yet, but we lost three people trying to bring that thing down. Yet somehow he is unscathed. I must know if his victory came through a strategy normal people can repeat, or if it’s another thing only the Hotakainens can do.”

Tuuri does not like the way he spits out their name- as a foul taste in his mouth. She draws herself up to her full and unimpressive height, and does her best to be imperious while cocooned in a fluffy blanket “As far as I’m aware the stuff that only a Hotakainen can do extends to getting grey hair before puberty. You’re all resourceful people. I’m sure you can figure out something.”

The Admiral doesn’t flinch “I need to interrogate him.”

“Do it tomorrow,” says Tuuri icily “Or if you want, I’ll do it now.” to her cousin “Lalli, what did you do to keep that thing,” she points to the cowering lattice of muck in the closet “From eating your liver?”

“Stabbed it.” 

“There you go he stabbed it. Now, good evening, Lord Kuutar, and company, it’s time for us to take our leave.”

A guttural voice repeats this from the closet: “Stabbed it.”  
Tuuri feels a wave of nausea hit her like a punch. Lalli edges away from the closet a little further and tugs her along. 

“You didn’t tell me it speaks.” she mutters.

There is no obvious mouth. The word seem to be spoken by the thin air.

“We didn’t know it spoke.” responds Kuutar.

“Speaks,” repeats the beast with the gravel voice of a smoker and the uncertainty of a toddler “Suggestions box. I told you to wear your coat.”

Tuuri swallows hard “So it can listen. It can learn. It has enough of a brain for speech, but so do trolls,” her mind works at a dizzying pace, thoughts crashing into each other as they race about the corners of her brain “But trolls don’t parrot what they hear. They retain memories of their past human forms and speak from that trace of humanity.”

“He is unscathed.” says the troll firmly “He is unscathed. Suggestions box. I told you to wear your coat- Finland Finland Finland.” 

“This thing has the ability to learn by listening,” she stares at its hunched frame, its ragged skin “Therefore we can assume it has the ability to learn by watching.” 

Then, with a trembling finger she points to herself “Hotakainen.”

“Hotakainen.” comes the gurgling echo.

Shaking harder, she points to the senior mage “Nurmi.”

“Nurmi. Hotakainen. Nurmi.”

The room watches this display in a thick silence. Kuutar’s moon-coloured eyes are bright with interest.

Back to herself “Nurmi.”

The beast pauses “Hotakainen.” it says.

“Nurmi.” insists Tuuri, still pointing at herself “I am Nurmi.”

Out comes a slow and stumbling sentence “You said you were Hotakainen.”

The room startles to life once more. The Admiral reaches for his gun, Nurmi for her knife, and Kuutar grasps the closet door and slams it shut on the beast.

“What the fuck is that thing?” hisses the Admiral “It knows our language!”

One of the officers turns pleading eyes towards Kuutar “That’s not a human, is it? Please say it isn’t a human, Lord Kuutar.”

Kuutar squares her jaw “I know no more than you.”

“We didn’t know it spoke.” rasps the beast. 

“You blasted fool!” suddenly Nurmi springs for Tuuri and grasps her about the collar of her dress, shouting in her face “Why did you teach it my name? It could fixate! It could come for -”

Lalli slips between them and sends Nurmi back with a gentle push “Please, ma’am. There is no need for this.”

Nurmi gathers up a handful of her own lank hair and pulls compulsively at her scalp “You don’t know that, Hotakainen, you blasted fool. It knows my name. It knows your name.”

“We need to contain this right now,” says another of the officers “Whatever that is it cannot be under such flimsy security near to Mikkeli.”

The beast starts to shriek with an unexpected violence “Mikkeli! Mikkeli Mikkeli Finland Mikkeli Finland Finland Saimaa Ens- Saimaa! Hotakainen! Vaste- grey, the grey, we need the grey, we must have him and his cold cat, we must have Saimaa- why did they leave us why do we sicken!”

Kuutar smashes a fist into the closet and roars “Be silent!” The lights dim briefly, the furniture jumps from the floor. 

It continues on heedless of her “Give to us the grey and gold so that we may die. I am Nurmi. I am I told you to wear your coat it could come for I told you to wear your coat. There is blood in my lungs and stabbed it, I told you to wear your coat, Hotakainen, I am Nurmi, I am Hotakainen, I am dead, I am Lord Kuutar, I am Mikkeli I am dead I am death I told you to wear your coat, Lalli-”

Kuutar’s fist smashes the top half of the door to splinters “BE SILENT!”

The lights explode. Shards of glass rain down on the assembly. Tuuri manages to toss the blanket over Lalli’s head to protect him, but is not so lucky as the windows buckle inwards and spray them with tiny splinters of glass.  
At last, the beast falls silent. Kuutar’s eyes are wide and bright as lamps.

“Hotakainens, take your leave. You will be summoned in the morning.”

 

When the war-room is at their backs and the hubbub of urgent voices can no longer be heard through the broken windows, the Hotakainens stop. They stand still in the cool night air for a moment. It’s dark now, or trying to be. The moon is low and bright over the lakes. Since Kuutar decided to grace the Saimaa area with her hallowed presence, the moon has been annoyingly close. There are rumours that Kuutar has allowed the moon to come closer so that she can keep an eye on the goings-on in Saimaa, now that she is invested in the place. Lalli calls bull on that. The moon is hundreds of thousands of miles away. If it were getting closer, gravity would have changed by now and the lakes would be floating over their heads or something like that.

It’s just Kuutar’s spiritual presence, and it isn’t pleasant to labour by night, early mornings and evenings with that nosy moon hanging over his shoulder.

Tuuri breaks the silence “Did it hurt you?”

He shrugs “Nothing I can’t recover from in a few days.”

“Hold my hand.” she orders as they begin to walk to back to the town.

Perhaps for situations like this, the war-room is separated from Mikkeli. The town hunches in a puddle of electric light silvered by the moon, while the lake laps at familiar shores no less than a quarter of a kilometre from the extreme edge of the town’s outskirts.

Lalli glances at the shore and sees a small clutch of ghosts, blown up on the sand like glowing plankton “They won’t hurt you.”

By now Tuuri has also spotted the ghosts on the shore. She glances between them and another few spectres drifting through the woods that Lalli has only just noticed.

She pulls his hand from his pocket and clutches him tightly “So you say.”

“I won’t let them.”

Her fear is palpable. Lalli has had twenty-one years to grow accustomed to the wan faces that peer through the trees at night, the hollow eyes that bore into him when he turns his back to the lake, but Tuuri has had only seven months. Lalli should be patient and supportive. He should not begrudge the task of holding her hand until they reach the electric lights of their apartment block.  
But he does, just a little bit. The evening he has just had was punishing and he would like nothing more than to start letting go of the fear, the tension. Otherwise it may build up in him, triggering a shut-down or a melt-down, whichever his mind sees fit to choose. He does not want to go through either. Instead he must absorb his cousin's fear into his own. 

The apartments are on the outskirts of Mikkeli, among the strip of low-built lodgings that ring the core of offices and military buildings, and will require a walk of about twenty minutes. All of this while sticking rigidly to the loose and perilous dirt path when Lalli knows a shortcut that will halve the time. Tuuri refuses the shortcut on the grounds that it involves walking through the woods; any stroll through the woods means a stroll through the ghosts that appear in them at night to bemoan their fate and freak out pedestrians. The things Lalli does for familial love

After a while, Tuuri tries to distract them “Can we talk in Icelandic? I want to keep mine sharp. So few people speak Icelandic out here. Honestly, this is such a boring Mikkeli compared to the Mikkeli we grew up in,” she coughs nervously and changes to Icelandic “Wherever you look around here it’s just labourers and soldiers. Farmers and mages who are more interested in bonding with the woods than their fellow humans- no offence Lalli. I miss our Mikkeli, you know? I miss the kids in the streets and Little Syria and the days when the lake would be alive with fishermen’s brats duelling with oars in their canoes.”

Lalli grunts.

“I mean, I know we’re building from the ground up here. Literally in the ashes. But still I feel like the new Mikkeli will come up so sterile and without culture. They should have brought some scholars with them, the settlers. We don’t even have a Cultural Centre here. Remember when we used to go down to the CC and take henna classes? And your mom used to sew shalwar kameez with the old Syrian folks, for their daughters and grand-daughters working abroad. Gods, I miss that. I was so hoping they would renovate the CC and bring all the culture back, but no, apparently stable-space is more important.”

“You can’t ride a shalwar kameez into battle.” he points out civilly.

“No, but you can wear one into battle and look badass. Oh, by the way, the dress fits like it did before. Perfect repair job! Thanks!”

“Sure."

“Oh and speaking of Icelandic and all will you come to the talk on Monday? It’ll look better if I have you there, you know? I’m talking about magical conjugation and there’s one of the first recorded cases of magical conjugation in the audience.” she smiles impishly and elbows him in the ribs “And it will be a real confidence boost to look up and see your radiant smile.”

He grimaces “You’re not going to make me sit up there with you, are you?”

“No.” but the sly glint in her eyes suggests otherwise. Well at least her machinations have distracted her from the death-white faces turning to them as they pass the woods.

Where Tuuri’s Icelandic is the stilted and formal Icelandic of someone who has learned their Icelandic in and for the professional setting, Lalli has the rural accent of a shepherd owing to the source of his Icelandic.

The incident now rather grandly named ‘magical conjugation’ happened on a quaint afternoon between the epic battle with the horse-ghost and the pick-up at the derelict military base. Mikkel sat himself on a fallen log to finish a piece of knitting and looked the picture of comfort and domestic peace. He attracted a sleepy mage who wanted this promise of peace and took it, in spite of the prolonged physical contact. Lalli sat down beside him on the log and used his shoulder as a pillow. Moments later, Reynir came and did the same. Both of them were soundly asleep when Sigrun summoned Mikkel for a chore. Unconcerned for the lodgers on his shoulders, Mikkel stood and Reynir and Lalli ended up knocking heads with a spectacularly satisfying ‘conk’.  
They came up muttering and rubbing their sore foreheads. Cursing each other in opposing languages. Lalli used rural Icelandic and Reynir used a lake-side Finnish, and they each spoke with the ease of a native speaker.

As it turns out, if a mage delivers a head-butt hard enough, they can exchange information from their mind to the mind of their victim. Reynir confirmed this a little later when he head-butted Emil to see if the effect would be the same. It was. After Emil’s bloody nose was plugged up with some tissue, his Finnish sounded fine. Sigrun was subjected to the same trick when she came around to see what the cacophony was about. She wound up with a Reynir-shaped forehead-bruise and perfect Icelandic.  
Tuuri’s dilemma is how she can tell this story without revealing how utterly ridiculous the now-legendary incident was. A head-butting festival that left everyone with expanded linguistic intelligence and a healthy fear of Reynir’s skull. 

“I’m going to talk about the reason the trials have been failing- you know, the ones the Norwegian government started at the ports? The one where they’re having a couple of mages head-butt people in hopes of getting the same results as our accident, you know about them, you heard me talking to Mikkel about them last week! Anyway, I figure that the reason yours and Reynir’s conjugation worked is because your havens were close at that point, right?”

Lalli nods. The closer they drew as team-mates and eventually friends, the closer their havens became. At the moment a corridor of trees and Lalli’s stream shield them from each other’s sight, but whenever Lalli sneezes now he expects to hear a cheerful ‘Bless you!’ called through the privacy partition/copse. 

“So the reason it isn’t working between mages who are strangers to each other is because the mage attempting conjugation and their quarry aren’t spiritually close enough, geographically and mentally. It has to be between people who trust each other.”

“I didn’t trust Reynir.” he says “Then.”

“But you trusted Mikkel, right? You went over to sleep on him and trusted him not to move- a big mistake on your part, Lalli-cat, but don’t worry. Mikkel breaks hearts all the time. So you were in a state of physical relaxation and then Reynir’s geographical proximity in the dreamscape made it a whole lot easier for the smooth exchange of linguistic information. I haven’t asked a god to confirm it yet, but I think this is a trick they must have agreed to among the pantheons, you know? To facilitate cooperation and- Ukko’s ball-sack!” she stumbles in the dark, slipping ankle-deep into a pothole.

While Lalli extracts her ankle from the hole, Tuuri continues to chatter as casually as if they were holding this conversation over tea in their kitchen “And then it worked with Emil because Reynir and Emil knew each other. Emil got the full language in his head, just like you, but down on the ports they’re only getting partial transferences, or they’re getting other things entirely. I heard a story about this one mage and this non-mage who tried conjugation and ended up exchanging memories instead. So the non-mage thought she was married to the mage’s husband, and the mage thought he was a bitter lonely fisherwoman with only flirtatious water spirits to keep her company.”

“Interesting.” he says, because he has not spoken in a while.

“Isn’t it? I could study this for the rest of my life, honestly-” and all at once she stops, choking.

Lalli realises she has been crying silently for at least a minute now. He opens his arms. She presses her face to his shoulder and rocks, holding him tight.

“How do you go out there,” she mutters between gasping sobs “When you know that kind of thing is out there?”

“It’s my job.”

“Fuck your job. You don’t need it. Stay behind the walls. Stay safe, with me.”

His eyes wander over her shoulder, to the ghosts on the shore. Pale shells discarded by a picky child. Seaweed washing up to rot and stink. From the woods to his back, he feels scores of eyes drilling into them.

“I need to do this.”

“Fuck you and your stupid patriotism. The Known World doesn’t need you.”

“For you. The world needs to be safe for you.”

That shuts her up. When she is prepared to walk again, she has nothing to say. But she holds onto his hand until they have reached their doorstep and crossed the threshold.


	6. Insomniac

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter specific warning: PTSD and insomnia. Mikkel has both

At first Mikkel is certain it is the blood that has awoken him. He is sure that he is back in the Kastrup field hospital, that his hands are clamped over the open wound in his sister’s ribcage and failing to staunch the flow of blood. He can hear that he is begging her to stay with him, all professionalism and calm gone, because this is his baby sister, this is the little girl he taught to walk and talk when he barely had a handle on it himself. And just around the time that Maja opens her eyes for the last time and cries for him to make the pain go away, he wakes up.  
The first thing Mikkel does is check his hands. He lifts them from the bedclothes and examines them, back to front, fingertip to wrist, and it is only when he is sure that they are clean that his heart-rate begins to slow. Still unsure of why he is awake, Mikkel wipes his wet eyes and slips out of bed to check on Mette. Her teenaged-independence has come through small victories like moving from her childhood room next door to his to the one at the end of the hall which a brother used to occupy. And, of course, the larger ones, like getting away with calling him a ‘side-burned bastard’ to his face.

Mette is curled up on her side in bed. As usual, she has kicked the covers to her ankles and shivers for the lack of them. While Mikkel draws them up to her chin and tucks her in, he hears what must be the second round of hammering at his door and realises why he is awake.

“Mikkel! This is no time to drag your feet, man!”

There are any number of reasons why his girlfriend of five years might be pounding on the door after midnight. Sakura sleep-walks like it’s an Olympic sport; she might have let herself out of her house again and ended up in front of his house, which would make it the third time in two months that she has done this. But then he remembers Sakura has a sentry shift tonight, and that gets him moving. Sigrun’s gods forbid, she might even be reporting a troll breach.

“Coming!” he calls back, pausing only to grab a jacket from the banister for the chilly spring night.

Sakura falls into his chest the moment the door is open “Babrscomung!” she cries into his shirt.

“What?” he straightens her up.

“The baby’s coming! Ms Sorensen’s having her baby!”

Mikkel sags with relief “Oh for Finnish heaven’s sakes! Can’t that woman ever deliver a baby that isn’t early?”

“Let’s get Mette,” urges Sakura “In fact, you wait here!”

She thunders up the stairs. Mikkel listens to a series of feminine shrieks and curses as he tugs on his shoes, and is ready to go when Sakura arrives with Mette on her back, who is wrapped in a comforter and beyond disgruntled to be awake.

“What the Hel?” she mumbles.

“Birth related emergency.” says Mikkel as they set off. Sakura has little trouble bounding a bit ahead of him with the littlest Madsen on her back- she carries Mette a lot. 

“Can’t you just leave me at home?” Mette groans.

“Nope.” 

“There’s no reason to-

“Fire, flood, troll-breach, invasion from spirits or a previously unknown settlement, earthquake, ghost-attack, choking, sudden organ failure-”

“Alright!” snaps Mette “Finnish gods above, it’s a wonder you don’t go to school with me these days! I’d like to sleep through one month where I don’t get toted out of the house to watch you dig around in some lady’s bits for a stubborn baby!”

“Why not?” asks Sakura “It’s highly educational! With this kind of training I’ll be surprised if you don’t end up getting into the career of digging around in vaginas for babies yourself.”

As it turns out, Mette need not worry about losing sleep. Mrs Sorensen is a veteran when it comes to giving birth with a total of six daughters so far, each of which Mikkel has been called onto deliver. The seventh daughter comes out around two in the morning after an easy labour, screaming like she’s already aware of the horror that awaits her in life; of taxes and mortgages and trolls pacing at the walls of whatever settlement she might live in.   
Each time Mikkel delivers a baby, at the back of his mind he is always painfully aware that he might be pulling a child into a life that will bring them nothing but struggle in pain. The Sorensens are good people. Good people, he has found, tend to suffer the most when the trolls break down the walls or something else goes unexpectedly and completely sideways. 

While he severs the umbilical cord and fends off the enthused father’s attempts to hold his newest daughter before she can be bathed, Mette and Sakura wait in the crowded living room with the other six Sorensens. Mikkel does feel a pang of guilt at stranding Mette in a room full of siblings. Surely, it reminds her of the family that scattered to the winds before she grew up enough to enjoy them. As the oldest of the family (no matter how vehemently Michael argues the half-minute head-start is his), Mikkel was already nineteen and chronically cynical of family values when Mette sprang out.   
Nearly twenty years stretches between them. By the time Mette arrived, Mikkel was burned out from basically raising his other four younger siblings with little in the way of help from Michael, who was too busy with various girlfriends and boyfriends to assist, or from his parents, who were far more interested in each other than their progeny.

Thus, the birth of another Madsen was more of a shackle for Mikkel than it was a blessing. While his younger siblings dashed off on apprenticeships and scholarships and Michael left the farm with designs of becoming a doctor, Mikkel stayed on at the farm with baby Mette in a sling on his back and a pitchfork in his hands. Fortunately for him, it is impossible to begrudge Mette for this. She did not know that she would condemn her biggest brother to a life of agricultural hell by simply being born. She knows now, of course, and resents him because she believes he must resent her on some subconscious level for essentially stranding him in Kastrup.  
He might have a life off the island. He might have more friends abroad than the crazies he ended up on the Tank with- and surely, she thinks, he only accepted such a hysterically dangerous assignment because he was so screaming bored of staying at home with her and the cows. In reality Mikkel was ordered to join the mission by an extremely shady and secretive branch of the government. These people have the power to make a family disappear off the face of the earth with a single order, if they so wished, and this is exactly what they had to threaten to do to get Mikkel on that Tank. 

The six months Mikkel spent away from Mette still yawns between them. Sakura is a sort of bridge, for having taken care of Mette for the winter Mikkel was away. She is a relay and a moderator, and for the past two months, the only person who can make Mette laugh without first engaging in some kind of accidental slapstick. The last time Mette laughed for Mikkel was when he fell through the roof of the barn and sent up a mushroom cloud of hay.

His hands still wet and slightly gory, Mikkel comes into the living room. The six daughters leap up and crowd around him expectantly.

“Another girl-”

The eldest of them punches the sky in triumph “Yes!”

“-she has a unilateral cleft lip, but that can be repaired, if your family wishes.” Mikkel waves them in “Just don’t hang off your mother! She needs time to recover.”

Mette gets to her feet, still in her comforter “Can we go now?”

“Get your shoes on.”

“I don’t have any shoes. Sakura just bundled me up and ran out of the house.”

Sakura grins sheepishly. Sighing, Mikkel gestures to his own back “Hop on then.”

“I’m not a baby.”

“You’re not a mountain-man with thick soles either. If you don’t want to be bloody-footed and infected with who knows what by the time we get home, get on my spine.”

She climbs onto him and wraps her arms sullenly around his shoulder. She barely touched the ground, when she was a baby, he carried her so much. Mikkel always had a chore and Mette always came along because he did not trust his parents to notice if she needed something. As a toddler, she would grab fistfuls of hay or feed and fling them in a direction of her choice- she called this ‘helping’.   
By this advanced age Mikkel assumed she would still be helping him. When he took up the duties of the town’s main midwife, he pictured himself working with Mette’s assistance until she left Bornholm for better, more exciting things. Perhaps she would be the one to get the knack of stitches. Mikkel had finally learned to stitch properly from Lalli, who took pity on his poor skills and tutored him until he was passable. Or maybe she wouldn’t and he would have to send her to Lalli to learn the same way he did, first in cloth, then in flesh. 

But Mette has no interest in helping him. Each time the subject comes up she stops him with the same remark: “I’m not gonna become you, alright? Give it a rest.”  
It hurts to hear this almost as much as it hurts to watch Maja die each night in his dreams.

“- good thing I got off sentry duty early, or Mrs Sorenson might have had to deliver her baby without your help. They’re not letting their daughters leave the house alone at night so one of them had to scream out the window at me.” finishes Sakura.

Mette scoffs “Well that’s stupid. The last time Bornholm had an honest-to-Finnish-gods murder, Mikkel and Michael were foetuses. And it’s not like the town’s crawling with predators.”

“Do you mean of the sexual nature or the natural nature?” Sakura glances nervously over her shoulder through the darkened streets “Because I have it on good authority that there’s a honey badger on the loose.”

“Again with this cryptid stuff?” groans Mette.

“Sakura, I promise you there is no such animal on this island. The most dangerous thing on this island is that excessively territorial squirrel in the tree outside the doctor’s office.” 

Sakura shrugs “All I’m saying is if I had daughters, or sons- just kids in general, gender or lack thereof doesn’t matter to a hungry honey badger- I wouldn’t let them outside without two rifles and a knife.”

“Why two rifles?” asks Mikkel.

“Assuming these are my biological children, then they’re bound to be as clumsy as me,” she smacks her belt, where two small handguns are holstered, in the American cowboy fashion “They’ll want a back-up for when they drop the first rifle in a puddle. Then again, they’re likely to be your biological children as well, so that patented Madsen glare might be enough to chase the badger off.”

“I pray for the sake of the human race that you two never reproduce.” says Mette.

They say goodbye to Sakura a few moments later. Mikkel refuses an offer to stay the night, because he knows that leaving Sakura’s house in the morning in a timely manner will be impossible. He is likely to spend the whole day sitting in the kitchen with her, just talking, while Mette runs wild all over Bornholm. Chores need to be done: cows to milk, dogs to walk, and he’ll have to find the heavy-duty gardening gloves so he can pill the cat without losing a finger.   
Mette falls silent after she says goodnight to Sakura. They have little to say to each other that would not be repetitions of previous, pointless arguments. Once they arrive at home Mikkel lets his sister down and watches her trudge away.

“Good night.”

She leaves without a word. It’s amazing the way she can injure him with the simplest gestures of resentment. 

The night has been a long one and Mikkel finds he has no desire to sleep. Even if he got back in bed he would end up memorising the cracks and contours in the ceiling. Maja’s open ribcage appears in front of him each time he closes his eyes.   
Instead of shedding his coat or boots, he takes two rifles from the closet. When he is sure Mette has gone back to sleep, he slips into her room and lays the first against her night-stand. The second he slings over a shoulder. Sakura had no complaints about her shift tonight so he doubts there is much for him to worry about in the way of trolls. It’s been a month and a half since the last one washed up, and that was just a dying sea-beast that bugled on the shore and menaced a few sea-gulls until it expired on its own. 

Popping his head out the door, Mikkel whistles for the dogs. Normally the dogs sleep outside because they cannot be trusted not to eat the sofa, and seem to prefer sleeping in the hay anyway. Distant barks, followed by a scratching at the door. All four dogs flood inside and clamour around Mikkel’s legs, licking him and yipping with joy.  
One of them is a German Shepherd, another is a border collie, the third is a small mutt, and the final is either an oddly coloured and shaggy black bear that somehow found its way to the island, or a Caucasian Mountain Dog. Mikkel has never bothered to check. She eats the same foods as the rest of the dogs (everything) and that’s good enough for him. 

He points upstairs “Mette.”

The dogs thunder up the stairs in an ecstasy of excitement. As much as they love the barn, they love piling onto Mette’s bed more. Either the three smaller ones cuddle up to her while the biggest of them sleeps on the ground, or the biggest claims Mette’s cuddle-time and relegates the other three to the ground. However the sleeping arrangements end up Mikkel doubts that any attacker with half a brain cell will want take on the 250 kg of dog sleeping around Mette. 

When insomnia strikes, Mikkel will do one of two things. He may lay paralysed in his bed by a variety of griefs and fears until the first chinks of dawn come through the window. Or he will shrug off his bedding, let the dogs in to guard Mette and take a walk. Shortly after he became an agent of the Shadow Council Mikkel picked up this habit, in the hopes of physically tiring himself enough to bring on sleep. These vain hopes fell away into a general desire to just be out of his bed and out of his house; away from his nightmares and his worries.  
Mentally, Mikkel adds a post-script to the letter he’s going to mail to Sigrun tomorrow: ‘any tips for PTSD that won’t let you sleep?’

Her PTSD is a tad gentler than his. It wakes her up at least once a week with a nightmare, but she is able to drop back off if she gets up and roams for half an hour. Mikkel wakes up a minimum of twice a week and a maximum of four or five, if he’s really having a bad week, and after that he is unable to sleep. There have been some weeks where Mikkel has not gotten a full night’s sleep adding to that the midwifery duties which are increasingly waking him in the middle of the night This, he knows, does no favours for his interactions with Mette. Sleeplessness makes him snappish and critical. He is more easily baited into a shouting match with her. He wastes more time arguing over trivial topics he would otherwise dismiss. He holds the little grudges for a little while longer, sometimes holding out all day until he allows himself to realise that Mette has no intention of being the first to apologise. 

“Parenting sucks,” he says to the dark Danish countryside.

The wind seems to whistle an agreement. He has no destination in mind as he walks, but tries not to stray too far from the house. He needs to be within ear-shot if Mette screams for help.

Parenting. It does suck. Will he ever be in a position where he is not acting as a parent of some sort? Before Mette were his other siblings. In the Tank, he talked with her twice-weekly over the radio, and then took on the duties of parenting Emil and Lalli a little bit- Emil needed to be taught how to keep his foot out of his mouth, and he helped Lalli to understand a few social cues that otherwise would have escaped him completely. Reynir needed a role model in sensibility because neither Sigrun nor Tuuri were going to present that. Tuuri was used to rebelling against an authority figure in her brother, so of course he ended up acting as the pseudo-Onni until he had returned her safely to the original. The only person he did not feel the need to mother was Sigrun, mostly because she is an age contemporary, but also because Sigrun made it clear over the course of the trip that she did not expect nor want him to take responsibility for her well-being. It was her job to do that for him, as the team’s captain.  
Now, he is thirty-three. If Sakura falls pregnant tomorrow he will probably be fifty-three by the time the first kid gets out of the house. Knowing Sakura’s desire for a big family, he expects to have no less than four children with her. Perhaps six if they can manage a pair of twins. That is a whole lot of raising. Mikkel will probably end up playing the role of a house-spouse. After the amount of time he has spent raising his own siblings, the instinct to hunker down and raise his children will be irresistible.

Not so bad, he supposes. He will be with a woman he loves. He will love their children all the more- enough to free them from the family curse of the ‘M’ name. Sigrun has made it clear she expects at least one of the kids to be named after her, and he quite likes the idea of the name Maja-Sigrun. 

Mikkel would have probably gone on thinking like this for the rest of the night, just relishing a bit of time alone with his thoughts for the future if the dying giant had not made itself known.

To the civilian and military population of the Known World, Jotun are a fantasy, or a long-dead race that once menaced their gods. The notion of a Jotun attack does not factor into the daily concerns of even the believers.  
Norwegian and Icelandic shepherds worry about wolves or the dreaded honey badger attacking their flock. Parents worry about the rare child-snatcher and trolls, their kids’ own sense of adventure, not about a race of ice-breathed giants. Defence experts build in anticipation of a resources war with some distant and greedy settlement that might reveal itself in the next few decades, and of course, of troll and giant attacks- not the kind of giant that pestered Thor.  
Really, no one believes in the existence or threat of Jotun apart from the people that have seen them. 

Apart from Mikkel Madsen and Siv Vasterstrom, this number totals to something like thirteen or fourteen. All of them are members of the Shadow Council in places of insidious authority. All of them could have anyone in the Known World killed at their whim. Frida Eide is of course excluded from these numbers, though she is the only person in the Known World who can claim to have killed a Jotun with her own hands. Frida Eide is, mercifully for the Shadow Council, written off as an attention-seeking old woman whose career has given her more than her fair share of PTSD.   
Therefore, the only person recognised as having hands-on experience with live Jotun is Mikkel. and it would have to be Mikkel who encounters the first Jotun ever to reach Bornholm.

It is the cry he recognises. A kind of low, thundering howl he heard at Kastrup. The soldiers who heard it too are either all dead or have forgotten the sound as just another of the strange host that echoed through Kastrup. And the ones who saw the source of these howls are, without exception, stone dead.

“I suppose this means we had better become believers.” said Maja, nodding towards the blue-skinned giant that reared up over the horizon.  
That is the last sentence Mikkel remembers her saying without having to gurgle through blood.

And it is what Mikkel is thinking as he turns and runs towards the sound at a speed that most who know him would not think him capable of. At the same time, the noise approaches him. Out of the shadows comes a lighter, bluer shadow, slick with ice-coloured blood and black mud.   
Mikkel stops. The Jotun staggers out into the moonlight, already fallen to one knee. It drags its naked body with the desperation of a dying animal going to water. Where it aims to go, Mikkel is not certain. The lights of Bornholm are distant and muted. It might as well be going in circles. He stands still and stays silent as the Jotun gets closer and closer. Mikkel might as well be made of mist; the Jotun has no idea he is there.

As far as he can tell it is not infected. The wounds which are going to kill it are filthy, in a way that suggests a troll attack. Mikkel has to make sure.

“Hey.”

This simple hail is enough to stop the Jotun’s progress. Once it stops, Mikkel feels a pang of guilt, looking into those hungry eyes, knowing it will not be able to move itself again. 

“What killed you?”

The Jotun hears him, but it does not understand him. In its own guttural language (one which is essentially ancient Swedish, which Mikkel learned fluently before he turned thirty, for his duties), the Jotun chokes out its last words in a low, mournful rasp “We are all dead.”

Mikkel raises his rifle. A spray of blood, a hole the size of an apple in the Jotun’s brow. It sags onto its belly with a dying groan.

Behind him, Mette lowers her rifle “What the fuck is that thing?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright that's enough plot-priming. Next chapter involves actual story-telling instead of people just running around and getting sleepier and sleepier as they do it. I can't believe this one stinking night has lasted for 6 chapters. I need to get my pacing-shiz together. Sorry about that.


	7. Drifting in and out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emil can't stay awake. The mages are concerned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Exercising the power of headcanon with regards to Reynir's gender and Lalli's autism. 
> 
> FYI, the term 'spoon' is a unit of measurement for the energy that someone (in the disabled community) has available to them. Spoons might be sorted and saved for different things, like executive function and verbal function. Lalli's not talking about silver-ware, just how he gets things done.

(Then: the good ship Túnfiskurinn)

 

In the last days, when plans have been finalised and everyone knows where everyone else is going to end up when they leave the boat, Lalli and Emil spend most of their time alone together. This is not necessarily by their own designs- it seems a series of happy accidents have left them in each other’s company with nothing to do but enjoy each other. In reality, Sigrun has picked up on the obvious connection between the two youngest of the team and issued her final, strict instruction as team captain: “Give them the space to finish falling in love.”

Tuuri is perturbed by the thought that her cousin might have gone off and developed a romantic relationship, or the beginnings of one, without her noticing “Six months isn’t long enough to fall in love.”

Sigrun scoffs “You kidding me? My mother proposed to my father on the battlefield the day she met him.”

“Yeah, well I can expect that from people in the Norwegian military, but not Lalli. Lalli hates everyone.”

“He doesn’t hate me,” volunteers Reynir “He told me last week.”

This makes Tuuri drop the book she is leafing through “He said that? Specifically that?”

“Yeah.”

Sigrun is smug with her small victory “Same to me.”

“And me. I couldn’t tell you what brought it on. It was like the way I came out to my parents as bi, sitting there, minding his own business and me minding mine, and he suddenly turns and tells me ‘Mikkel I don’t hate you’. Except of course I turned to my parents and said ‘you’ll never guess who I snogged last night’-”

“No one is interested in your issues, ‘Kel, we’re just interested in letting the boys figure out what’s what.” she turns to Tuuri and lays a sympathetic hand on her shoulder “I’m not saying they’re gonna get married or whatever, but I think there’s a good chance they’ll get together. They’ve gotten really close this winter. Like, if I ever need to find Lalli I just look in the same direction as Emil’s wistful gazes and there he is. So let’s give them some space to work it out, alright?”

Technically, as Sigrun is still her captain, Tuuri is required to accept this as a solemn order. Tuuri is to give the boys their breathing space and extract herself from situations in which they might prefer to be alone. The sacrifice is the greatest on Reynir’s part; Lalli has become a real friend since they have been able to speak to each other consciously, carrying the little rapport grown in the dreamscape into the waking world. It has been decided that Reynir will go to Dalsnes for training as a military mage, while also taking correspondence classes with the Icelandic Mage Academy (involving everything from meeting tutors in the dreamscape to multiple-choice quizzes mailed to him), and that puts a lot of the Known World between him and his (dare he say it) best friend?   
But in Reynir’s typical selfless manner he has realised he is still far better off than Emil. At least he can see Lalli in either of their havens whenever they want to hang out, which will probably be every night. Emil will only be able to write letters and look forwards to the times when they manage to reunite. 

So Reynir makes it his personal mission to let give them as much time together as he can manage. Sometimes this involves quietly excusing himself from the deck. Sometimes this involves summoning the entire crew as well as his own team from the lower-decks with a false emergency, and once a real emergency when he gets so caught up in the moment he actually throws himself over-board. 

Today, it is Mikkel who leaves them alone. The three of them lean on the deck-side , watching the crew finish off a battle with a particularly recalcitrant sea-beast. Captain Åsa stands at the head of what she calls a ‘battle-boat’, though in reality it is a fortified rowboat with a gigantic spear stuck on the prow. 

“I WANT THAT THING’S SKIN FOR STOCKINGS!” she bellows, and similar sentiments. 

“My father used to do exactly what she’s doing with her sword, except he used an oar.” mumbles Lalli. The faint greenish tint around his neck is the gentlest symptom of the sea-sickness that has dogged him since stepping foot on the boat.   
Frankly, Mikkel disagrees with Sigrun on the marriage thing; Lalli has been either puking or warning everyone that he is about to puke for almost two weeks and Emil has never once let him feel he is repulsive for it. ‘Stricken’ is the word Emil used. Mikkel is a firm believer that if you are sea-sick multiple times on a man and he still finds you as attractive and engaging as Emil so obviously finds Lalli, then life-long partnership is a given.

So at this hint that Lalli is about to open himself up to Emil, Mikkel clears his throat “I’ll leave you to it, boys. I’m going to go pretend to sleep and see what kind of obnoxious snoring noises it will take to chase off Sigrun this time.”

Emil groans “Please, go easy on her. Every time you fake-snore her out of the cabin she gets in bed with me- and she kicks, Mikkel, she kicks like Hel.”

“I know! Have you seen the size of the cabin we have to share? She kicks me when I’m on the other side of the room. There is not a corner of that cabin where her long legs can’t reach me. Why do you think I send her to you?”  
Mikkel takes his leave before Emil can retort, leaving the two of them to their own devices.

Tentatively, Emil massages Lalli between the shoulder blades “You feel ok?”

“No.” Lalli hesitates. He enjoys the slight pressure on his back. It distracts him from the more urgent pressure in his stomach, of stomach acid determined to introduce itself to the ocean “I feel better than when we left.”

“I wish this wasn’t such-”

“FIGHT TO THE DEATH, YING! BITE IT BACK! BITE IT BACK!”

“-Hel on you. Seems like the Silent World was easier for you to deal with.”

Given the chance Lalli would much rather be stumbling over carpets of corpses two-deep than on this boat. He doesn’t tell Emil this, but instead rests his head against Emil’s shoulder and stares at Asa once more.  
He is can see a man in her place. Not wiry and wrinkled from age, or wearing a resplendent captain’s uniform with a bloody spear held above his head. This man is much younger, laughing, clad in a simple wool shirt and patched trousers. He is armed with an oar and the famous Hotakainen resilience, and stands up in a canoe that rocks dangerously from a blow by the circling sea-beast. Lalli is taut and curious, balanced on his mother’s shoulders.

“Your mom let him do that in front of you?” Emil is trying not to laugh, though the image of a kind of an older-Lalli, as he imagines Lalli’s father would look like, whacking sea-beasts with an oar is torturously funny.

“She would have covered my eyes if it looked like he was going to die in front of us.”

“OLOFSEN, PLAY DEAD! STICK OUT YOUR TONGUE AND MAKE A SOUND LIKE GAS LEAKING OUT OF YOUR CORPSE!”

“So was that his job, or was it a hobby?”

It still boggles Lalli’s mind, the way Emil treats troll hunting and killing as a professional job. They come from very different places. Around the time Emil was learning his alphabet, Lalli already had his down and was learning how to properly line up the sights of a rifle. In Saimaa, children learn how to track and kill trolls before they can tie their boot-laces. Mikkel’s stories of Bornholm make it sound like the island is in a perpetual state of siege by sea-beasts coming in on all sides- he says he has never once spent a day on the shores that did not include him killing a troll. Sigrun claims her childhood rattle was made of troll-bones she herself procured, and Lalli has little trouble believing her.  
The only other person whose childhood nears Emil’s in terms of being as sheltered is Reynir, and Reynir’s country has never seen so much as a speck of the Rash breach their defences since Y 15. Even Reynir had to wrestle the odd rabid dog off his flock, and is happy to show off his scars as proof to this encounter to anyone who will keep looking after he starts to pull down his pants. (They’re on his upper-thighs. Reynir tried to show the scars to Lalli about five times before Lalli finally gathered sufficient courage to keep looking)

Lalli has figured it is better to reveal Emil’s ignorance of the world to him slowly, gently, as one might step into cold water. “He liked it, I guess. But he was a doctor.”

Emil cannot conceal his surprise “Really?” and he goes pink, knowing Lalli knows what he is thinking.

“You expected a hunter? A crazy woodsman? That was my grandfather, allegedly.”

Emil shakes his head “No! No, I mean, I kind of thought he might be a mage? Like, kind of a crazy powerful village wise-man type?”

“EXCELLENT JOB YING! DIG THAT TOOTH OUT OF YOUR STERNUM AND MAKE A PENDANT OF IT! WEAR YOUR SPOILS WITH PRIDE!”

“That was my grandmother. My father was…he was not the wise man you’re thinking of.”

Jukka Hotakainen was not an especially talented or remarkable man. He had his mother’s magic, but not in the raw, mighty form his son inherited. His was a magic for tricks like bringing water to boil or repairing cracked dishes. He had his mother’s wits too, but chose to devote these to tasks a tad smaller than single-handedly defeating kades. Jukka understood the world as something which constantly broke and sickened, and needed someone who was willing to push it back into place and apply medicine where necessary. This was his task. Saving the world was not.   
At that stage in Lalli’s life, back when he was so young he barely knew what was going through his own head, it was difficult to guess at his father’s thoughts. He barely had time to get to know him; Lalli was eight years old and largely disinterested in his father when Jukka died. At the time his autism was a pushy thing, refusing to let him stick to one place or to one stimming activity. Jukka’s work was all about sitting still, steady hands and the like. Lalli’s world was a mess of sensory input and his time went into testing what felt right and wrong. There was not much of a chance for an overlap.

“Was he like Mikkel?”

“No. He had training.”

Emil cracks up and flicks Lalli on the shoulder “Don’t let ‘Kel hear you say that. I meant, did he set bones and deliver babies? Or did he magic away diseases?”

What did Jukka do? Lalli seems to remember a lot of herbs in their house. All over the counter-tops, forever simmering over the hearth in giant pots, producing scents so pungent the strongest of them could chase Lalli and his delicate nose into his cousins’ house until his own was properly aired. And Jukka was always trying to get him to eat and drink infusions of this or that. Little-Lalli’s autism was hysterically sensitive to the textures of food and the tastes of drinks, so mostly these attempts ended in Lalli refusing the potions after the first sip.   
There are other things he can remember. Jukka always called him ‘Lalli-Saku’. He considered the nickname ‘Lalli-cat’ to be an insult to the intelligence of everyone who used or heard it. The first time the streets iced over each winter, Jukka would go out in his socks and slide around the ice. He liked cats, but did not keep any in the house because Näkki made Lalli incredibly territorial around other felines. He always called Tuulikki ‘scout’ after her profession, which made Lalli suspect from an early age that his father did not actually know his mother’s name. 

But these details are irrelevant. Emil wants to know if Jukka was the sort of doctor to sit in an office taking swabs or if he ran around the woods after bloody scouts and soldiers. 

“All of that.”

“Is that why you’re good at stitches? Because your father was a doctor?”

Lalli shakes his head “I was too little to learn his medicine,” not too little to learn how to kill a troll with his teeth, but there’s only so much Emil can digest in one go “I’m good at stitches because I had to be. Onni and Tuuri rip their stuff a lot. Tuuri’s the only person I know who can rip her pants while reading a book.”

“EXCELLENT WORK, PEOPLE! NOW BRING ME THE SPINAL CORD!”

“Does Onni ever leave Keuruu?” asks Emil quizzically “I thought he stayed inside the walls. I mean, except for his little pilgrimage to Mora this winter.”

Lalli cannot answer Emil- his stomach is feeling rebellious and has decided it no longer wishes to be a part of Lalli’s digestive system. What follows is a series of dry-heaves and disgusting noises. Emil is a saint of patience. He pats Lalli on the back and makes comforting noises in Swedish until the attack of nausea has finished. 

“Oh gods, I didn’t even think about Keuruu.” mumbles Lalli.

“Why? What’s wrong with Keuruu?”

“I have to take a ferry to get there.”

Emil winces sympathetically “Can you sleep through it?”

“Probably not.”

“Why don’t you just borrow something from Mikkel’s drug stash? You know, those painkillers he gave to Tuuri when her period was bothering her? The stuff made her sleep for six hours straight.”

That drug also put Tuuri so out of it that she became convinced everyone in the Tank, save herself, were actually gigantic and sentient lizards in human skin-suits. Before she passed out she pestered all of them to take off their skin-suits: “Don’t worry guys, I’ll still love you as big lizards. Come on ‘Kel. Peel off that weird face. I wanna see if you’ve got neck-ruffles.”

Lalli isn’t sure if Tuuri has a low-tolerance for painkillers or if everyone reacts to the drug like that. The thought of losing control of himself is too disturbing to seriously consider, though, so he has resigned himself to enduring some interminable hours of sea-sickness on the way back to Keuruu. Already, he knows the bout of sickness he will deal with on the trip to Keuruu is going to be a thousand times worse than what he has now. Even though he has not been able to hold down all three of his meals on any given day and the sensation of ceaseless movement makes him feel more ghost than human, and dealing with the constant sickness has forced him to sacrifice his verbal spoons for other things to avoid a shut-down, the trip back to Keuruu is going to be so much worse because he will be alone by then.  
Mostly. Tuuri and Onni don’t count because he is with them all the time. Being with his family does not count as company in his mind; does a fish count the simple act of swimming as exercise? But he will lose the other four. Sigrun and Emil will go to Dalsnes, and Reynir will most likely follow (if the ferocious arguments he’s been having with his parents over the radio about returning to Iceland are anything to go by), and Mikkel is will go back to Bornholm, to be with his littlest sister and resume management of the Madsen family farm. Kitty he cannot shake. Tuuri is determined that Kitty should come back to Keuruu to be cuddled and spoiled. Lalli is stuck with the little beast for the foreseeable future. 

Lalli has not given himself a chance to realise how much the Tank and its crew has come to mean to him. After what happened to his birth family in Mikkeli, he is not all that eager to gain another one. Losing another family would do something to his mind that he would never be able to learn to live with. His parents, his uncle and aunt, his grandmother and the foetal sister he tries not to think about- the void they left in him refuses to be filled or repaired.  
He has had to find a way to live with that pain each day. Onni and Tuuri have too. Sometimes the knowledge that he was not alone has helped. Most of the time it has not. Their shared pain has a way of leaking into the air and congealing there, so that there is always the scent of stale pain in their apartments. Being with other people thins it out. It has been good, he thinks, to be surrounded by other people to whom their pain is alien. Onni is stranded in a loud house with happy children and pleasant hosts. He and Tuuri have had nothing to do over the last winter but survive, and make friends.

He was not prepared for this. For Emil.

“They’re coming back. Maybe we should clear off the deck for now.”

Lalli watches the fortified row-boat turn, the wet and bloody figures occupying it. Did they ever look like that, in the Tank? Were they ever so bruised and triumphant and delighted with each other all at once? 

Emil wraps an arm around his shoulder “Lalli? Are you alright?”

“Not yet,” Lalli straightens up carefully, a hand pressed to his aching stomach “But I will be.”

 

(Now: Lalli’s haven)

“You would not believe the day I’ve had!”

Reynir comes in through the entrance by the far side of the haven, so like the groggy owner of the haven he completely fails to notice firstly the lindworm silently pacing in front of the haven, and secondly Emil conked out on a wolf-skin beside Lalli’s pond.   
Yawning, Lalli straightens up on his raft and swings his legs over the side. He rubs his eyes clear and gropes for his luonto, finding that Nakki is curled up on the other side of the raft. At his touch, Nakki shudders to life and drifts into the air. He stretches his back out and mumbles something bitter that Lalli does not catch. Nanna-Elka bounds into the air to join him. She covers his face in doggy-kisses, then he puts her in a headlock and starts to wash her fur between the ears.

“Evening.” he yawns again.

“Evening!” Reynir helps him jump to the shore. The idea is to prevent Lalli from getting soaked from the waist-down every time he wakes up. Sometimes it works. Most of the time he ends up with at least one foot in the water. This evening, for some reason, Lalli decides to be a little mischievous and makes sure to kick up a great spray of water as he lands. Reynir lightly splashed. 

“Hey!” Reynir laughs “Man-child!”

Lalli stretches his long arms over his head and shakes his head like a dog drying itself “I think I’ve had a worse day.”

“No way, nothing you had to do compares to what I went through!”

“You think so?”

“I would put money on it. But I don’t carry my wallet here,” Reynir plucks a flower from his braid, one of the trail he likes to weave into his hair when he has some down-time in his own haven “So if you really did have a worse night than I did, you get a flower instead.”

Lalli shrugs “Bring it on, Braidy.”

Nanna-Elka interrupts “Is no one going to acknowledge the unconscious man on the ground?”

“Yeah, I was wondering about that.” says Näkki. 

 

(Now: the wilds of Norway)

Emil has no idea what is going on, except that he is sure he is no longer on a horse.

He becomes aware of being about ten metres off the ground at the same time he becomes aware of being stuck in a tree. A hand is on his throat, attached to something unspeakably frightening. The confusion is dizzying. One moment he watched a lindworm pace and growl for his blood, the next his blood has been spilt in alarming quantities by a creature he has no name for.  
Terror wins out over the grip on his throat. Emil screams. The creature is shocked. It did not plan for its prey to come back to life and start kicking and scratching. Emil fights with no strategy and no idea of what he’s fighting. For an instant, the image of a tar-covered monster falls away and he feels hands of flesh around his neck and the face in front of him is one he sees a little bit of every time he looks at his uncle.

He’s about to cry out for his father to stop when reality snaps back into place, Emil realises his situation, and starts to think clearly. Eyes go for the eyes- but it has no eyes- then go for the mouth.  
The creature opens its mouth to hiss at him and instead gets a mouthful of fist. A jagged tooth pops through the skin between Emil’s knuckles, but he doesn’t feel it. This shock proves enough to get it to drop him. Luckily for Emil, he misjudged the height and only falls about two metres.  
With more adrenalin in him than blood, Emil can ignore the fact that he has just been winded jumps to his feet. He reaches for his rifle. Not there of course. But Emil has no intention of starting another race for his life, especially at this ungodly hour of the night.

He scoops up a snapped branch with a sharp tip and waits for his attacker to come for him. The creature slithers about half the distance before the bark beside what might be its head explodes. The smell of gunfire reaches Emil and he risks a glance over his shoulder- Mikkelsen, their rifle aimed at Emil’s head. He dives for cover and ends up rolling under a patch of thick bracken.  
From between the roots, he watches the mage and the creature do battle. A quick battle- so quick it barely deserves to be called a battle. The creature leaps for Mikkelsen and is rewarded for its boldness with a shot to the chest. Like a piece of rotten fruit being squeezed, the creature’s torso oozes in every direction. To Emil’s horror the bottom half carries on as if nothing has happened for about four paces, then falls dead at Mikkelsen’s boots.

For a few beats, everything is silent.

Emil gathers himself and his courage, and scoots out from under the bush “Is my horse ok?”

The look of contempt on Mikkelsen’s face makes Emil want to roll back into the bracken “What?”

“The horse I was riding. Is it-”

“Fine, yes, it’s fine. Your comrades are too if you’re worried about them at all.”

“Well I figured they would be alright. My horse didn’t have a rifle.” he notices with a jolt the teeth between his knuckles and tears them out, flinging the jagged things away in disgust “Um, do you know what that was?”

“Yes. I have been praying to Lord Hel more often in this past year and she has…she has shared visions with me, of the creatures that are beginning to stir.”

Emil wishes the creature were still alive. Fighting it would give him the excuse to get away from Mikkelsen. He lets out a small “Is that so?”

Mikkelsen nods gravely “While I do not know what it is that you killed earlier today, I can tell you what that is. You’re a heathen, but I assume you at least know our stories? Do you know what I mean when I say that is a svartalf?”

The noise Emil makes is neither polite nor professional. He recovers: “Those evil things? Uh, yeah, my uncle used to tell me about svartalf to scare me into staying home at night. But I thought they were supposed to be tall and pretty and stuff. Like, a bunch of beautiful people that can unhinge their jaws and swallow humans whole.”

They chose to ignore this “That is an infected svartalf. Lord Hel has shared with me that the gates of Svartalfaheimr have just broken open, so you had better get used to those things. They will swarm us in two days’ time. Give or take a few hours.”

(Lalli’s haven)

After a certain amount of poking and prodding, the assembled mages and luonto/fylgja determine the interloper is definitely Emil. No question of this being a trick, an illusion or some figment of Lalli’s imagination that has manifested in his haven, like the flock of sheep that graze amok in Reynir’s haven. The guy on the ground is Emil: he has Emil’s hair (though longer) and curls up on his side like Emil does when asleep and has the same facial scars in the appropriate places. The little slash taken out of his left eyebrow, the chink of scar tissue on his chin. Even a bruise on his neck which Reynir remembers Emil had just gotten that day.

“But he’s not a mage,” says Reynir, prodding Emil gently in the stomach with a stick in an effort to stir him “He’s as unmagical as anyone can get. And why is he wearing a crown? What’s with this sword? Does he know how to use a sword?”

“I’m just saying he would wake up a lot faster if you’d let me bite him-”

Lalli pushes Näkki’s muzzle from Emil’s leg for the third time “Are we sure he’s non-magical? There might be some things he’s never told us he could do…things he ignored because he was so against believing in magic before the thing with the murder-horse.”

Reynir’s face is pensive “I don’t think so. I mean, when you’ve got magic, you’ve got it whether you want it or not, and your magic makes sure you know that. It takes care of you.”

Of course Reynir has cause to believe this. Anyone who knows Reynir well will have heard the story; he was born a girl and hated it passionately. He did not mind being packed into dresses, but being introduced as a ‘daughter’ or ‘sister’ made him want to chew his own limbs off. So he told his parents and with their support changed his name from Dagmar to Reynir, after a half-forgotten grand-something, and while his parents were making the arrangements with a local mage for his hormone-blocking treatments, Reynir somehow corrected his biological gender all on his own.

No one has any idea how it happened. One day he was a functional, biological girl, and the next day he was a functional, biological boy. How Reynir’s parents managed to convince him that the magic which did this was not his own, Lalli has no idea, but somehow Reynir missed the clue that he was an exceptionally powerful mage. Owing to Reynir’s inexperienced and young magic, his breasts stayed on and developed as they would in a female’s puberty. He never bothered to get rid of them. He likes them. Apparently they are useful for hiding small things.

Frowning, Reynir peels back Emil’s cloak and glances down the front of his shirt “I wonder if he’s got boobs too?”

“You know he doesn’t. We’ve all seen each other shirtless.”   
Lalli does not add that he has paid a lot of attention to Emil’s body, a lot more than necessary, and would have guessed by now if Emil had corrected his gender like Reynir.

“What if he has really little boobs? I’ve got cleavage, but Sig doesn’t. What if he’s got boobs like Sigrun’s?”

Nanna-Elka pulls her mage back by the collar “Reynir, stop harassing the man. Emil doesn’t have boobs. I know you want to meet other trans-folk, but this isn’t the way to do it.”

Meanwhile, the lindworm has pressed its revolting face up to the barrier and drools blood all over the grass outside. It seems to be imagining the taste of magical flesh.  
Näkki nods to the lindworm “What do we do about that?”

Lalli thinks for a moment “We should call Onni.”

 

(The wilds of Norway)

The rest of the group are pleasantly surprised to find Emil is still alive and kicking. One woman, the one who had evidently taken on the terrible task of telling Sigrun that her pet Swede perished in battle, sags so deeply with relief that she falls flat on her face.

“The situation has changed,” announces Mikkelsen, climbing back onto their horse “We’re headed back.”

“What about the troll splat?” asks the woman with her face in the ground.

“That can be dealt with later. I had a vision from Lord Hel confirmed for me when Västerström was so good as to fall asleep and facilitate his kidnapping,” a brief pause, a withering glare at Emil “We need to be back at Dalsnes within the hour.”

 

(Lalli’s haven)

Onni drops in from the sky, using his luonto’s wings to skirt the lindworm. He lands in front of them without warning and rolls to his feet, only to be smacked between the eyes by a stick and knocked on his ass again.

Onni clutches his face, cursing “Reynir, you bastard!”

Reynir flings his stick to the side and scrambles to help Onni up “Sorry! I thought you were another monster!”

Meanwhile, Nanna-Elka turns in excited circles as Onni’s luonto descends. She is easily the largest and most impressive spirit in the haven; both because Onni’s magic is far more mature than the other two’s, and because she has always been a grand creature. Even back when Onni was a tiny thing, his luonto wore her fluffy owlet’s down in a way that suggested the mane of a mighty lion rather than a tiny ball of baby-floof.

“Pirkko!” cries Nanna-Elka “I feel like we haven’t talked in years!”

Pirkko alights on Näkki’s back, ignoring his protests “We talked last week.”

“I’m a dog! Time is different for me. A day is a week and a week is a year-”

“Get your feathered ass off me,” growls Näkki “You’re gigantic, you know! You weigh as much as Mikkel.”

Pirkko nuzzles his head affectionately with a beak approximately the size of a steak knife “It’s good to see you too. And you, Lalli-cat.”

“What is going on?” demands Onni. Now that he has had a chance to gauge the situation, he realises how outrageously weird it is. He jabs a finger at the slavering lindworm “Which one of you berks attracted that thing? And how the sweaty Hel did he (gesturing to Emil with the poking-stick) get in here? Mortal avatars can’t move in the dreamscape. Young man, if you moved him I swear to the gods above and present…I’ll do something violent.”

“I didn’t move him. He was here when I woke up.”

Reynir leaps to Lalli’s defence “And I just woke Lalli up.”

At this point, Emil feels the need to join the conversation. With an ear-piercing scream, he sits up abruptly and stares straight ahead of him with wide eyes. The whole haven jumps and Näkki ends up dislodging Pirkko in his surprise, who falls forwards and must find something else to latch onto quickly, before she lands on her wings. Unfortunately for Emil, the only thing within the reach of Pirkko’s enormous talons is him. She lands solidly on his shoulders, a talon on each, and glances between her legs at him.

“Excuse me, that was incredibly rude of me. I was about to land on my wings, you see, and as you can feel I am really quite heavy so I couldn’t risk the damage. My name is Pirkko, and I recognise you from the fight. You were the young man with the flamethrower and the high-pitched scream, yes?”

The combination of the crushing weight and the fact that a snowy owl the size of a small boat is sitting on him, talking politely, proves to be too much for Emil. He passes out again and Pirkko manoeuvres rapidly to stand on his chest before he crushes her.

She looks up uncertainly at Onni “I think I may have killed him.”

(The gates of Dalsnes)

A little ways away from Dalsnes, Emil blacks out. Just long enough to fall off his horse (again), but Mikkelsen has grown tired of losing the Swede. They make Emil get in front of them on their own horse so he will not be able to roll away for a third time. By some miracle, Emil manages not to weep with fear and tolerates the bony arms that are wrapped around his waist to keep him in place.

For the second time that night, an Eide is stationed at the gates to receive the limping war-party. This time it is Asbjørn Eide, Sigrun’s father or ‘Mr General’, and only Emil will limp when he gets off his horse. Asbjørn is neither surprised nor pleased to see them. Rather than waiting to greet them when they have all been ushered inside the gates, he chooses to shimmy down the fortifications, dodging a few chunks of pulverised troll, and lands on his feet in front of Mikkelsen just as they are bringing their horse to a stop.

“You’re back early.” notes Asbjørn “I see Västerström’s been attacked again. What is it with you and getting attacked, Västerström?”

Emil slides off his horse with the same amount of grace as a fish flopping on a ship’s deck “Couldn’t tell you sir. Maybe the monsters can smell the softie Swede on me.”  
The beginnings of a ferocious head-ache gather in his temples. It will be a miracle if he can find the energy to stay awake.

(Lalli’s haven)

“This test is infallible for determining whether or not someone is dead.”

Onni kneels beside Emil, his expression as solemn as if he is about to commit the younger man to his grave. He then pinches Emil’s nose between his forefinger and thumb and waits patiently. A reaction comes several seconds later when Emil gasps loudly through his mouth, honking in alarm. Still dead asleep, Emil slaps ineffectively at the hand on his nose. But Onni is satisfied and releases his grasp; in a few seconds Emil is peacefully asleep once more.

“Where did you learn that?” asks Reynir.

“Uncle Jukka. His trick for figuring out if someone who was apparently dead really was dead. If you hold the nose for long enough, the mouth will pop open.”

“Isä was weird.” adds Lalli for Reynir’s benefit. 

Onni straightens up and brushes the grass from his knees “If he isn’t dead, then he’s asleep. And it stands to reason he can move and function here, otherwise he wouldn’t have gotten into Lalli’s haven. He probably brought that along with him.” 

The lindworm attempts to snap at Onni’s pointing finger, but gets a mouthful of gold light instead. Wherever Lalli’s boundaries are disturbed, this field of energy activates and flings the problematic creature away. The lindworm is much larger than most of the threats the barrier has ever had to deal with, but it holds firm, and frustrates the lindworm’s attempts to get inside and slaughter everyone. 

“What should we do about that?” asks Nanna-Elka.

“I could kill it.” offers Näkki, flexing his claws in anticipation.

Onni puts his hood up- a sure sign that he is about to unleash magical wrath “You really couldn’t, Näkki, so don’t try. Pirkko, let’s take care of this thing.”

“Are you going to refuse our help? You’ve got four other entities here, Reynir the fucking volcano of Icelandic power, and us, who were perfectly fine for most of the time in the Silent World thanks very much you asshole, and you want to take that thing down on your own? What happened to your ego? Did Anna insult your cooking again? ‘Cos it is pretty bad, cousin.”

Though Lalli agrees implicitly with Näkki (especially about the cooking), he wraps an arm around his luonto and holds his muzzle shut with his elbow “We’ll wait.”

“Oh we will, will we?” Reynir crosses his arms “Go on then, Onni, protect the damsels. Is there a male version for that? Man-sels?”

“I don’t know when you two got so sassy.” mutters Onni under his breath.

“We are not sassy- I’m not sassy, Lalli’s a bit sassy- I just don’t like being treated as a helpless idiot. I’ll agree to the idiot part, but I’m not the same guy that came out of the crate of carrots. I’d appreciate it if you’d recognise that.”

“Yeah!” adds Nanna-Elka. 

Lalli clears his throat “Please just attack the lindworm.”  
The look on Onni’s face tells him this argument will resume later. Hopefully, when Lalli is out of earshot. One sure way to exhaust his spoons supply, in all categories, is to have to watch the people he loves fight amongst themselves. 

“We’ll finish this later.” Onni turns his back to them and advances to meet the lindworm. 

“Holy Ukko- my head.” Emil sits up, then looks down at himself “I’m still a fairy prince.”

Before he notices any of the three mages or fantastic animals around him, he notices the lindworm. Something inside him snaps- audibly snaps. Reynir hears it, Lalli hears it, and it startles all of the animals. Onni only just has the time to dive to the side as Emil rockets towards the lindworm, his sword drawn.

“I AM SO SICK OF YOU YOU BIG BASTARD WORM!”

“Was that his spine or his brain?” squeaks Reynir.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know if you can call that an ending, but next chapter the boys are getting handed their mission. And Sigrun punches stuff. So hopefully it will flow a little better.


End file.
